when we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

She always wanted to believe in things.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

It might be just some trend that came and went, ' I said. 'But for us, it's our life.

Nothing humbles a rich man better than a poor man that isn’t willing to do ‘anything’ for money.

Be wary of people who go out of their way in charity. They're usually compensating for some evil they're trying to erase.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

A girl asked me if she could comb my hair. Nobody can comb my hair, I can’t even comb my hair.

Teamwork gives you the best opportunity to turn vision into reality.

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

Grandmothers are to life what the Ph.D. is to education. There is nothing you can feel, taste, expect, predict, or want that the grandmothers in your family do not know about in detail.

The Comedy Store attracts all types of people, growing up I was able to meet them all.

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

The old men know when an old man dies.