I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming?

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.