"OK, so, sometimes I lie. I mean I'm weird, man, about random stuff too. I don't even know why I do it. It's like... it's like a tic. I mean sometimes I hear myself say something and think, "Wow, that wasn't even remotely true"."

"My mom always says that, when she can see I'm, like, working something out in my head. She's like, "You're in it right now" and I'm looking at you telling this story, and you're definitely in it."

"Wow! I cannot believe you're not really retarded!"

"If you can't laugh at yourself, life is going to seem a whole lot longer than you'd like."

"What's the word that's burning in your heart?"

"This is your one opportunity to do something that no one has ever done before, and that no one will copy throughout human existence. And if nothing else, you will be remembered as the one guy who ever did this. This one thing."

"What do you do? You laugh. I'm not saying I don't cry, but in between, I laugh. And I realize how silly it is to take anything too seriously. Plus, I look forward to a good cry. It feels pretty good."

"You gotta hear this one song. It'll change your life, I swear."

"You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore…all of a sudden even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone…or maybe it's like this rite of passage…you will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, for your kids, for the family you start. It’s like a cycle or something. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people that miss the same imaginary place."

"We're not playing "Spin the Bottle." How old are we? More importantly, how old are they?"

"You changed my life. You changed my life, and I've known you four days. This is the beginning of something really big, but right now, I gotta go."

"My mom just died. God, it's weird to say it out loud. But, my mom just died."

"It's amazing how much of my life has been determined by a quarter inch piece of plastic."

"[To Sam] I don't want to waste another moment of my life without you in it."

"This is my life, Dad. This is it. I've spent 26 years waiting for something else to start. So, no, I don't think it's too much to take on, because it's everything there is. I see now it's all there is. You and I are gonna be okay. You know that, right? We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let's just allow ourselves to be whatever it is we are, and that will be better, okay? I think that will be better."

"You know, this necklace makes me think of this totally random memory of my mother. I was a little kid, and I was crying for whatever reason, and she was cradling me, rocking me back and forth, and I can just remember the silver balls floating around. And there was, like, snot running down my nose, right? And she gave me her sleeve - and told me to blow my nose into it. And I can remember, even as a little kid, thinking to myself: Wow. This is love...this is love."

"We have one of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement."

"Joelle Carter - Penny Hardwick"

"Tim Robbins - Ian "Ray" Raymond"

"Joan Cusack - Liz"

"Lili Taylor - Sarah Kendrew"

"Sara Gilbert - Annaugh Moss"

"Lisa Bonet - Marie DeSalle"

"Catherine Zeta-Jones - Charlie Nicholson"

"Todd Louiso - Dick"

"Jack Black - Barry Judd"

"Iben Hjejle - Laura"

"John Cusack - Rob Gordon"

"Ah man, that's great. That's the fun thing about workin' in a record store - you get to play crappy pop you don't even wanna listen to."

"Rob. Top 5 musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s go... Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins... is it better to burn out or fade awaaay?"

"It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like."

"Rob, I'm telling you this for your own good, that's the worst fuckin' sweater I've ever seen, it's a Cosby sweater. A Cooooosssssssby sweataahhhh."

"Some people never got over 'Nam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I guess I never really got over Charlie. But, the thing I learned from the whole Charlie debacle? You gotta punch your weight. See, Charlie? She was out of my class. She was too pretty. Too smart, too witty, too much."

"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up is hard to do. It takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch. But you don't want to blow your wad. So then you gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway, I've started to make a tape, in my head, for Laura. Full of stuff she'd like. Full of stuff that'd make her happy. For the first time I can sorta see how that's done."

"Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all, you 're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing."

"Top five things I miss about Laura. One; sense of humor. Very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving. And she's got one of the best all time laughs in the history of all time laughs, she laughs with her entire body. Two; she's got character. Or at least she had character before the Ian nightmare. She's loyal and honest, and she doesn't even take it out on people when she's having a bad day. That's character. Three; I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home. [lipsyncs four, while holding up four fingers] I really dig how she walks around. It's like she doesn't care how she looks or what she projects and it's not that she doesn't care it's just, she's not affected I guess, and that gives her grace. And five; she does this thing in bed when she can't get to sleep, she kinda half moans and then rubs her feet together an equal number of times... it just kills me. Believe me, I mean, I could do a top five things about her that drive me crazy but it's just your garden variety women you know, schizo stuff and that's the kind of thing that got me here."

"My desert island, all-time, top-five most memorable breakups, in chronological order, are as follows: Alison Ashmore; Penny Hardwick; Jackie Alden; Charlie Nicholson; and Sarah Kendrew. Those were the ones that really hurt. [Yelling to Laura out the window] Can you see your name on that list, Laura? Maybe you'd sneak into the top ten. But there's just no room for you in the top five, sorry. Those places are reserved for the kind of humiliation and heartbreak you're just not capable of delivering."

"Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch between her legs instead. It was like trying to borrow a dollar, getting turned down, and asking for fifty grand instead."

"It would be nice to think that since I was 14 times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, instincts more developed, but there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one."

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

"Read any women's magazine and you'll find the same complaint over and over again: men are not interested in foreplay and they are hopeless in bed. They are selfish, greedy, clumsy, and unsophisticated. These complaints I can't help feeling are kind of ironic 'cause back then, all we wanted was foreplay and girls weren't interested. We were told not to even think about it. Foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. The perfect couple, if you ask me, is the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old b-b-b-boy."

"Jesus. I'm glad I know nothing about psychotherapy, about Jung and Freud and that lot. If I did, I'd probably be extremely frightened by now: the woman who wants to have sex in the place where she used to go for walks with her dead dad is probably very dangerous indeed."

"I can't fire them. I hired these guys for three days a week and they just started showing up, every day. That was four years ago."

"Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds."

"It made sense to pool our collective loathing for the opposite sex, and while we were doing that, share a bed with someone at the same time. Only people of a certain disposition are sure they're going to be alone for the rest of their lives at age 26, and we were of that disposition."