In those early days, the important thing was the happy ending. I did not tolerate unhappy endings – for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like ‚Wuthering Heights,‘ and very, very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.