But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets.

There's only one thing more beautiful than a beautiful dream, and that's a beautiful reality.

When you have real power you don't threaten. People know what your capabilities are.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

That,” she says, “was never here before.

That is what fame is, isn't it? To get the world to fall in love with you.

I am a woman. My life is a long, strong, twisted rope, made up of a number of human relationships, nothing more.

You can only learn when you teach.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.