“Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these s...”

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to...”

“Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely ...”

“In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us.”

“Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.”

“Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull an...”

“When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I re...”

“I could spend whole days at Cinecittà. There, I am the greatest director of all time. On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach, I rework the dolly shots for St...”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”

“Nature: it might be the magical key to unlock a locked imagination.”

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

“Because we all need to believe in movies, sometimes.”

“You float like a feather," sings Radiohead, "In a beautiful world." I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. ...”

“I think this is why Ellis took so many moving pictures of us. Because he knew that people come in and out of your life, and a picture fixes them in the moment they reach out to you.”