One of the great things about movies is that it's just that short period of time. It's a bubble. The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants!

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

Eat every meal as if it's your last; when the last one comes, you probably won't be very hungry.

Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

My closet is full of sad little scripts that didn't get made that have sad endings. It's very hard to get a movie made that has a sad ending.