I was in a fertility situation publicly, so I disappeared. I was very satisfied just being to able to creatively express myself with writing. The white hot publicity that came from 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' was appreciated but not sought, so I was happy to walk away from it and then write.

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

If men disappeared tomorrow, we'd still be having the abortion debate. If men disappeared tomorrow, there would still be racism and conflicts over religion.

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

Incidents happen that mean more mail. The birth of children, obviously, a sudden religious marriage, the tragic loss of a cat - I had over 2,000 letters when my cat disappeared.

When I was younger, I wanted to marry early, like at 23. Year by year, I found things I wanted to do, and the thought of marriage disappeared. But I don't want to marry too late. Around 31?

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

Kids can't build a marble statue at home. But I've had parents tell me that, after an exhibit, their kids immediately dug out their Lego kits and disappeared for three days.

My eyes were bad. I stuttered. I had hepatitis, double pneumonia, even anemia. When I was 7, my family took me on a trip to Cuba, and all my ailments disappeared. Cuba gave me health, so I've been deeply attached to Cubans ever since.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.

In places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

"There's this mental illness, right? It's called 'anhedonia.' It means 'without pleasure.' You can look it up, though all you really need to do is look around." She motioned to the door the other women had disappeared through, and to the world at large. "A good deal of people, mostly women, spend their entire lives in this state. It's a sort of half-death. But if you recognize this, you can fix it...You focus on bliss. Small pleasures. Fill your day with as many as you can fit into twenty-four hours. You devote every possible moment not to fulfilling another person-a man-but yourself."-Suzanne

It was him, it was always him, they only needed to stand there with their feet buried into the muddy moss and look at each other; to feel each other. Time stopped, movement disappeared and it was both the beginning of everything and the end of everything else. They had each other and there was no name, no title to it other than they just had each other. There was no necessity to be practical, what they had and what they were, was of their own and in their own and I think nothing in the world could have made Lucy happier than to have what they had, to be what they were.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

From my low perch, I watch the world as it passes by on these dirty side streets. There are no westerners in this corner of the city. Just locals going about their business. Weighing out brightly colored spices, walking back from the fish market, stopping at the paan shop, socializing over tea. Old men in lungis and flip-flops walking hand in hand and dirty-faced children who are all bright smiles and wild eyes. I am comfortable here. Sitting on this board, in this tiny chai stall, hidden away from the recognizable world. For the moment, I have disappeared.

I always thought old age would be a writer's best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory's gone, all the old fluency's disappeared. I don't write a single sentence without saying to myself, 'It's a lie!' So I know I was right. It's the best chance I've ever had.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing-they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

I couldn't stand here, hanging on, when the very thing I held disappeared more with each passing day.

I was 21 in 1968 so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies in the West anyway would have seemed absurd in 1968.