All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

Oh, man, ‘the nursery, ’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids, ” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

As is our enthusiasm, so is our ability.

It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge.

There is art in taking time to appreciate the clean wash of the mind's silence.

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

We are a sensational team.

I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding."

I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true.