So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.

All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.

I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage.

...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)

...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.

People who don't marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married.

...that's part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would.

Just like life, it was only the contrast with darkness that had made it seem brighter.

She'd been pounding her location and thoughts into a device that would send those things to virtually any human with Internet access and yet looking over her shoulder had been a violation of privacy.

Messi is a Playstation.

Most people have the wrong idea about me because I've been very private.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

Servants must be big people. Big enough to go on, remembering the right and forgetting the wrong.

Even if the character is something that seems ridiculous on paper, there's a human element to everything. Otherwise, we don't connect with it.

No one in America fully understands the constantly changing Internal Revenue Code. Agents of the IRS do not, judges do not, congressmen do not, and most assuredly taxpayers do not.

I liked being able to portray a woman at this particular age and at this point in her life.

The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.