19 Quotes by Valerie Martin

So happy ending all round, more or less. I know you’re relieved. But much as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we are sitting down to the feast.

Sex can be estranging; it can drive two otherwise compatible people apart.

I was thinking about … how disarming is the ability to make people laugh. It’s a gift, mimicry, but it’s not acting; in a way it’s the opposite of acting, which is why comedians are seldom good actors. There’s an element of exaggeration in the imposture; the copy is the original painted with a broad brush and it can be grotesque, even cruel. But no one is offended. People are drawn to the funnyman who can imitate a politician or a famous actor or an ethnic type, especially his own ethnic type.

As everyone knows, in my profession we go around screwing each other as much as possible, mostly to see ourselves do it. Narcissists are always making love to number one.

One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television.

Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line.

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.

(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.