But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.

There are some people out there who don't wait for what come next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.

I'm generally somebody who hopes for the best. It's not what one ought to do in my line of work [screenwriting], but it is what I do.

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing

You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.