He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Old age is no place for sissies.

Crafting is putting ideas into action and then holding them together with an inexpensive adhesive.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

The illogical man is what advertising is after. This is why advertising is so anti-rational; this is why it aims at uprooting not only the rationality of man but his common sense.

You never appreciate your anonymity until you don't have it anymore.

This is a revolution, damn it! We're going to have to offend somebody!

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

Shaping it is something I would expect to do together with a writer, because that's a director's job.

Well I think it has always been a mistake to reduce the peace process in Ireland to a decommissioning process.

Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need.