"Oftentimes lately it’s reading a script, but that can come with some jeopardy, because reading a script predisposes you to a kind of movie you expect to see, and then when it falls short of that expectation you have to realign. Sometimes the best experiences are when I know nothing about this movie, I’ve never met the director and I come and see something and I’m blank, because then it’s coming at you in a way it would never come at you if you’d read the script, with an expectation."

"People seem to find it hard to believe, but I'm a very serious person. It wasn't luck that I became a ballplayer. I never wanted to be anything else and I never considered anything else and I worked m…"

"A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flo…"

"The original dispute was one of poetic diction... From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chin…"

"I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality. Ch. 2, "The Late Mr. Wells"