“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

“As you become more aligned with the truth of who you are, the question of liking yourself goes away. It is a natural state of being.”

“You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?”

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”

“Vanda (as Dunayev): When she becomes herself--an individual. Thomas (as Kushemski): you only say that because you yourself are so individual. Vanda (as Dunayev): A man usually says that to a woman whose individuality he is about to undermine.”