And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.