Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.

I'm patient when it comes to my career, which is unlike me, but there are no stars in my eyes. I make where I go. It's that sort of thing.

I love my work, and I feel fortunate to be doing a job I love, but it isn't the centre of my life.

Being an entrepreneur is tough. Really, really tough.

Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'