The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.

... so many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?