“We enter into a relationship with any text we hear or read, like the relationship with a friend, a lover, or an enemy. A relationship is the ultimate meaning of the text.”

“Each reader of the same text, like each lover of the same woman (or the other way around), modulates that text, transforms that lover, finds in it/her/him something that has never been discovered before. ”

“You can learn to do anything in the world if your life depends on it and if you can read.”

“Everyone needs to be deceived and, provided it doesn't cost too much, wants to be fooled.”

“I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.”

“All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.”

“It's okay, you can do it. Because I am playing with myself as I write this, I hope you're doing the same as you read it. Otherwise there's not much point. Go ahead. Don't be shy or modest, prudish or self-conscious. That's it. It feels nice, doesn't it?”