When I wake up, I expect things to be good. If they're not, then I try to set about trying to make them as good as I can 'cause I know I'm gonna have to live that day anyway. So why not try to make the most of it if you can? Some days, they pan out a...
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself...
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Ma...
It's almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I'm just going, 'Any moment, someone's going to find out I'm a total fraud, and that I don't deserve any of what I've achieved. I can't possibly live up t...
Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same i...
At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously c...
I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at th...
If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in thei...
But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced ...
I'm going to keep it real gully with you; the first two months, I wanted to give him back. I expected someone to come and save me because after you have the baby, nobody cares about you anymore. Nobody cares if you sleep, nobody cares if you eat. It'...
I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. ...
We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have ...
This catch-22 happens a lot to men. A man can sense that a woman wants to know if he loves her. He doesn't want to share those feelings because, if he does, she will expect him to marry her and be greatly hurt if he doesn't. In romantic movies, lovin...
You do not want to talk to me on the phone. How do I know? Because I don't want to talk to you on the phone. Nothing personal, I just can't stand the thing. I find it intrusive and somehow presumptuous. It sounds off insolently whenever it chooses an...
There was a time in my 40s where I thought, oh, it's all over - not just work, but I'm never going to feel young again, I'm always going to feel like I know what's going to happen, I'll know what to expect. Looking back I don't know if that was a mid...
[663 finds his apartment is flooded] Cop663: Did I leave the tap running, or is the apartment getting more tearful? I always thought it would cope okay. Didn't expect it to cry so much. When people cry, they can dry their eyes with tissues. But when ...
Susan Alexander Kane: Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want! I'm Charles Foster Kane. Whatever you want - just name it and it's yours! Only love me! Don't expect me to love you!
Anthony: That waitress sized us up in two seconds. We're black and black people don't tip. So she wasn't gonna waste her time. Now somebody like that? Nothing you can do to change their mind. Peter: So, uh... how much did you leave? Anthony: You expe...
Simon Foster: [Answers knock at hotel room door] Come in. I just wasn't expecting to see you here. Well, not physically here. You're always in my heart. Malcolm Tucker: I'm here. I'm there. I'm fuckin' everywhere. I'm the eggman. Simon Foster: Have y...
Ellen Griswold: Clark, let's just skip the house of mud. I think Dodge City was enough fun for one day. Besides, Catherine and Eddie are expecting us. Clark: It's living history Ellen. But if you'd rather see your cousins. Personally I'd rather see a...
Skinner: Surely you don't expect me to believe this is your first time cooking? Linguini: It's not. Skinner: I KNEW IT! Linguini: It's my... second, third, fourth, fifth time. Monday was my first time. But I've taken out the garbage lots of times bef...
