living in Los Angeles was like being an extra in a movie that was starring other people entirely.

Panic is efficient. Panic is effective. Panic is the way I get things done! Panic attacks are my booster rockets!

All autobiography is fiction.

When faced with writer's block, lower your standards and keep going.

Los Angeles is the nation's cultural scapegoat.

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

Typically, middle-class educated parents' search for their children's schools takes on the feel, if not of teen girls trying on different outfits, of adolescents trying on various selves.

In the end, the real wisdom of menopause may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is.

Don't be fretting...about me marrying. Marrying's a trouble and not marrying's a trouble and I sticks to the trouble I knows.

It is better to hope than despair.

Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

It often looks like an actor's had a big break out of nowhere, but in reality, they've been working their way up, little by little, for a while.

Sometimes parents, when they have a lot of small children, it's hard because your time's got to get divvied up. There's no other way.

I have a gold bullion and a 'one additional minute for your life' in my hand; as a gift, if you choose the second one, then I say you are a wise person!

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.

Coaching is not a natural way of life. Your victories and losses are too clear cut.