“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...”

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so?There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”

“Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector...and miss.”

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”