“We are, after all, witnessing everyone and everything at its most heightened. Each story is imbued with a distinct pathos, be it betrayal, hatred, jubilation, confusion, acceptance, or mercy.”

“As I sat drenching myself in Giono’s world, it was as if I knew I had a soul.”

“Maybe the work I did, mulling over the show and creating order out of chaos, imagining character beats and plotlines that would make better use of the cast and ring truer to established stakes, forced the show and its characters into my soul.”

“Johns and Rauschenberg are in the curious position of being understood as a pair, but not a couple.”

I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something…about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.

“Being over 70 is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.”

The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart.