It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

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.

Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

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?