When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.

... I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.