My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic but to find a cinematic equivalent.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.