The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.

But she couldn't start this, because then it would end. Stories like this always ended. She couldn't take this pleasure, because she would spend the rest of her life missing it, hurting from it.

The orbit of human vision has widened and art has annexed fresh territories that were formerly denied to it.

We're phonies if we're not exactly who we are.

It is wrong that corporations and the super wealthy play by a different set of rules.

This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.

My growth as an artist and a person has been so slow and gradual, it's hard to make a story out of it.

No man weighs his words who has but a moment to live.

The problem's name is God.

Count no mortal fortunate till he has departed this life free from pain.