And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.