America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.

Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.

If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn't work, you're a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn't sound great to me!

I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

I'm like a Dilbert cartoon.

If you're choking in a restaurant you can just say the magic words, 'Heimlich maneuver,' and all will be well. Trouble is, it's difficult to say 'Heimlich maneuver' when you're choking to death.

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

Christ called as his Apostles only men. He did this in a totally free and sovereign way.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.