Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Anything worth having has its price.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.