“Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends.”

“Making benches is no walk in the park. It takes one a lot of love to make a bench, and then it takes two to make love on that bench.”

“I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.”

“Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.”

“We have plenty of room for people...in our lives, I mean. Especially the ones who make us be the people we want to be.”

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”