That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years, ” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.

Art is a by-product of an honest and successful attempt to do something well.

France... What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully-conceived and brilliantly-executed war in Iraq?

Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

I feel a responsibility to make sure that the voices from our community are heard. I do not feel a responsibility to agree with them. No one tells me what to think. I think for me.

If I had one wish I'd wish for a million wishes because I am clever.

We must dissent from the fear.