Starlets were always turning up dead in people’s pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.

Hollywood culture is a universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to recieve new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines.

Try to be one of the people,” said Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost.” As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also – lucky for them – inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for.

It’s the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. ‘On the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.

Most people don’t want to die, but they don’t want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

The things that make us human often make us ill.

If you're a landlord, you don't need to preserve your collateral. You just flip it on the land prices alone.

I've got to admit, I was pretty bummed out most of the weekend because it just seemed like the timing would have been perfect. Still, you have to think in a city like this, where there's a will there's a way.

Across New York, parents want fair funding of public schools. If Sen. Bruno doesn't want to take action to fix our public education crisis . . . ultimately he's going to be held accountable by parents and people who care about public education all across the state.