Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?