I Would Never Complain About

A Joke Was Not A Single-use Item But Something You Brought Out Again And Again Until It Fell Apart In Your Hand Like A Cheap Umbrella.

But At The Best Of Times She Feels Like A Character In A Muriel Spark Novel — Independent, Bookish, Sharp-minded, Secretly Romantic.

The Sad Fact Is That I Love Dickens And Donne And Keats And Eliot And Forster And Conrad And Fitzgerald And Kafka And Wilde And Orwell And Waugh And Marvell And Greene And Sterne And Shakespeare And Webster And Swift And Yeats And Joyce And Hardy, Really, Really Love Them. It’s Just That They Don’t Love Me Back.

Screenwriting Is Always About What People Say Or Do, Whereas Good Writing Is About A Thought Process Or An Abstract Image Or An Internal Monologue, None Of Which Works On Screen.

Emma Was A Shocking Driver, Simultaneously Sloppy And Petrified, And For The First Fifty Miles Had Been Absent-mindedly Driving With Her Spectacles On Top Of Her Contact Lenses So That Other Traffic Loomed Menacingly Out Of Nowhere Like Alien Space Cruisers.