He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. “Just watch me,” he said.

All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

Dr. Roboy, in Litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence.