Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.

Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it.

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.

It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me.

I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done.

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something.

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.

That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

People keep saying, 'Oh, you're getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.' I guess it does, but mostly it's just a relief.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections.

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

She was a natural blonde with delicate hands and feet and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well it raises the quality of human life.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

A father is a man who fails every day.

Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.

Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.

For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it's just a natural human response to loss.

With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

I was just a big guy running down with a big, deep pocket and little short stick putting it against my chest.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

No matter how deep a study you make. What you really have to rely on is your own intuition and when it comes down to it, you really don't know what's going to happen until you do it.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

He saved the production a tremendous amount. Now they did the scene where Omar is on the horse and he's in the deep snow, they went to Finland to do that. That scene they went to Finland for a week. I wasn't around then.

We have deep depth.

Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.