You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

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?

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

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?