Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.