With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

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

Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.