Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.

Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.

That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

Vera said: 'Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?' So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.