“If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.”

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

“I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.”

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the ope...”

“Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl.”

“Girls get screwed.Not that kind of screwed, what I mean is, they're always on the short end of things.The way things work, how guys feel great, but make girls feelcheap for doingexactly what they b...”

“Try patting them on the back or shoulder and telling them everything is going to be fine. Lots of times when girls cry, they don't want you to fix the problem, they just want to be consoled.”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished...”

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing o...”

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”