I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.