What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Someone once asked me “If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?” And I said “No, thanks, I think I’ll stick at this.”
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
I don’t believe there’s any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.
I don’t hold grudges.
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
There’s a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.