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

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.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

I was as big as I have ever been. I had a personal trainer and was working out. I was feeling good. I was muscular. I had never weighed more than 155 pounds.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.