The first gay person I ever met was surely not the first gay person I ever met.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Here's a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can't anticipate how you'll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.

The movies we love and admire are to some extent a function of who we are when we see them.

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

TV happens. And once it's happened, it's gone. When it's gone, you move on, no tears, no tantrums, no videotape