When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.

It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.

I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.

When hope is gone, time is punishment.

With Marguerite, he wanted only time—more and more time—and he was granted it, nighttimes and daytimes and nighttimes again.

In business people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.

I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue.