«Men kick friendship around like a football but it doesn't seem to break. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.»

«Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.»

«Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselves to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves / there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it? / are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help / can you face him honestly?).»

«The need for devotion to something outside ourselves is even more profound than the need for companionship. If we are not to go to pieces or wither away, we must have some purpose in life; for no man can live for himself alone.»

«It was really just whatever - good times, bad times, it didn't matter. There was no ceremony. It wasn't like 'Okay, this just happened, I have to go hack a piece of my flesh off.'»

«Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.»

«Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a traveler?and novelists are often travelers?is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.»

«Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the Forest that was left out by mistake.»

«I really approached the film as if it was a white big piece of paper and I was just going to draw a picture on it. And whether that picture was good or bad, whatever people thought of it, what they could never take away was that it was my picture.»

«It's fun to imagine what you could do with that kind of money. I could buy that island I've wanted to buy all my life, and live there with my family. Or I could buy some great piece of art that's just going to feed my eyes every day. It's fun to toy with the notion of that, and it is very tempting because money, unfortunately is freedom in today's world.»