I am not personally a parent. But I do have two godchildren and am expecting a third. I am naturally concerned for their future. If I ruled the world you could bet your boots that none of them would ever set their eyes on any such contraptions as digital clocks and pocket calculators. But alas, I do not rule the world and that, I am afraid, is the story of my life - always a godmother, never a God.

To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.

If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like.

What starts love is your ability to stupefy and blind yourself to the point of being able to fall in love. What stops it is waking up.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you're eating dinner.

I hate money. It is boring and it is arithmetic. The two things I hate the most.