As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.

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.

You ought to forgive.

Fate was a train that didn't stop until it reached its final destination.

Life is part of negative, and full of positive only wise knows it.

Because we build the worlds we wouldn't mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there.

As a director, you can transform your vision more with the music.

Creatures are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed.

The sage attends to the belly, and not to what he sees.

Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment.