After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about.

Twilight is about getting older and relationships - not about a murder mystery. It's about love when you reach a certain age; nothing is in primary colors.

Beauty doesn't have anything to do with prettiness. Beauty has to do with something else; it gets into an area where words can't go.

There was a kind of cultural life in New York that wasn't as solidified as it is now, it wasn't as money-driven. If you look at the size of the successful art galleries compared to the size of galleries now - there was no such thing as the Gagosian Gallery or Pace Gallery. But it was a time when magazines were a vital part of American life, and Esquire gave me a free pass to every world - I could get to the art world, the theater world, the movie world. It allowed you to roam through the cultural life of New York City.

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.

I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.