The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.