I have never turned to my girlfriend and said, Oh, okay, babe, and I see it in scripts all the time.
Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.
Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.
Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.
Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .
Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.
And gain is gain, however small.
Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel
But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.
The government of freemen is nobler and implies more virtue than despotic government. Neither is a city to be deemed happy or a legislator to be praised because he trains his citizens to conquer and obtain dominion over their neighbors, for there is great evil in this.