Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.

It has been said that the reason we establish relationships is to assure ourselves of a witness to our lives.

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

My motto: 'No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.'

It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.

Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.

Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple's market share provides us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.