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

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

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

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

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.

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.

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?