In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.

There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.

The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down.

The bond of love must be kept strong.

This day, you are free, because you have chosen to be free – and because of your choice, your days of insignificance are over.

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

When a plane lands in the Hudson and there's a Twitter user on the ferry taking a picture of it, Boom. That's it. The water is still splashing. Here's the photo of the thing.

The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.

It'd be nice if Asian actors could be perceived as profitable, which is the bottom line. We're perceived as not mattering much fiscally.

Yesterdays depth is feeling very shallow, I wanna go deeper, deeper still.

This entire most beautiful order of good things is going to pass away after its measure has been exhausted; for both morning and evening were made in them.