one could drown in irrelevance.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.

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

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.