It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

Discovery is the joy.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you've got nowhere to go.

...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course.

...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...This was untrue, of course.

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

Give me wildflowers instead of your heart, for I’d rather have them wither than the latter.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

The only genre I have any problem with is musicals, but that's just my own tastes it's nothing to do with the films.

Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn't end there.

I'm the voice of honesty.

No poem should be an urn to contain a meaning, but a net to catch what meanings float through the day.

Every single one of us who has been a Woman in Film for more than five minutes is sick of the phrase Women in Film.

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.