Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed-guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

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

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