Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.