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?

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.