To exist is to be betrayed, since we exist for others only by virtue of what we betray of ourselves to them.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable.

A baby is a smiling, dancing moon in our hands just waiting to touch our hearts.

Fletcher was always going to be your ex-boyfriend, from the moment you met him. He's just finally caught up with where he's supposed to be.

His mercy, not our merits, make[s] us his.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.

I've always had a problem with the average macho man - they've always been a threat to me.

As a child, I remember I always wanted to make my parents happy and give them everything in their lives.