Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

All joy lies in the present moment. The journey of life and prosperity are made of the present moment.

Awareness is the first step in rewriting old stories.

Life should play background music just as in the movies.

Approachable people are “straight-up.” It is comforting to know exactly what to expect when you see them. What you see is what you get!

People need to realise what real happiness and success is, because success as an actor is fleeting. You can be up there one day and gone the next.

Information upon points of practical politics.

The world has an ending and a beginning. It begins with you and it ends with you. The end of the world occurs when you make a major transition in attention.

I'd rather make a mistake than do nothing.

If I was on an airplane, the people in coach would know who I am. But no one in first class would know.

Most of my choices come about through some kind of intuition or instinct, and if I need to, I'll post-rationalize them, intellectually, afterwards. But generally, they come about just by feeling.