Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.