He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.

Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.