It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.