“It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.”

“Her strategy for honoring the dead had always been to take action - solve the mystery, punish the criminal. But what did you do when there was no one to punish? When there were no answers to find? ...”

“But sometimes the lies we let ourselves believe are for our own good.”

“It's funny: I always, as a high school teacher and particularly as a high school yearbook teacher, because yearbook staffs are 90 percent female, I got to sit in and overhear teenage girl talk for ...”

“I could not finance a movie on my own. Frankly, I could not even afford to take a year off. I, like most people in America, need to keep making money.”

“Reading 'Youth in Revolt' might have ruined my career because suddenly I wanted to abandon all the emotional truth of something and just go out far on a literary limb with completely implausible th...”

“This is why you shouldnt hire your friends. Its all nice and professional until the insubordination starts. She sighed.”

“It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that...”

“All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.”

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”