Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

Honey, you're the one who stopped sleeping with me, OK? It'll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date exactly, because it was Hitler's birthday

While we're waiting for a cab I'll give you your lesson for today. Don't listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don't pay attention. Just, just see what they look like and that's how you'll know what life is really gonna be like.

If God is everywhere, I had concluded, then He is in food. Therefore, the more I ate the godlier I would become. Impelled by this new religious fervor, I glutted myself like a fanatic.

I always felt that the problems of the world would never ever be solved until people came to terms with the deeper issues [spiritual] - that there would be an aimless reshuffling of world leaders and governments and programs.

I don't why whatever works and whatever doesn't. You just make the film that you enjoy making at the time, and you think there's a good chance that people might enjoy the story. You're surprised pleasantly when they do. It's just luck.

The comedies are not a million laughs on the set. Its business and the dramas are business as well, really. When I'm writing it I struggle more with drama because I started out in comedy.