“We all look good for our age. Except for our necks.”
“You’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.”
“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
“I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.”
“You can never have too much butter — that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it.“
“It’s much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.”
“What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.”
“Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.”
“Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.”
“It’s always hard to remember love – years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? ”
“I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.”
“Everything is copy.”
“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”
“You should try to relax about having people over. I have friends who are nervous hostesses, and it just contaminates the entire mood of the evening. They are always rushing from the room to check things and have a wild look in their eyes when they return from the kitchen.”
“Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.”
“You can never have too much butter.”
“It’s much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.”
“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”
“I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I’ll know how it turned out.”
“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
“Show me a woman who cries when the leaves turn in autumn and I’ll show you a real assh*le.”
“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”
“Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this.”
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. ”
“The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.”
“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”
“I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I’ll know how it turned out.”
“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”
“When you’re attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.”
“The moment you stop work on a script seems to be determined not by whether you think the draft is good but simply by whether shooting is about to begin: if it is, you get to call your script a final draft; and if it’s not, you can always write another revision. This might seem to be a hateful way to live, but the odd thing is that it’s somehow comforting; as long as you’re revising, the project isn’t dead.”
“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does. ”
“I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don’t do anything. I just sort of have lunch — all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.”
“I don’t want to be someone that you’re settling for. I don’t want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn’t it?”
“So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained not just in society but in literature. The women’s movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don’t know if it can clean up the mess in our minds.”
“I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.”
”I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.”
“I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.”
“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.”
“You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.”
“I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I’m dead.”
“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”
“Beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.”
“I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don’t. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I’m not.”
