If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

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."

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.