But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

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

Into adulthood through which everyone is always in a different way. Do not feel left out because of it. So, do not worry about it. Since everyone has experienced the same thing.

We need rules when we are young but once they are instilled we can have sensible leeway

A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

What a man sows that shall he and his relations reap.

In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he.

I've never won an award for anything, and I think it's weird. I mean, that's really cool but it's strange to think you could get an award for acting. I always thought that was strange.

To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. ... See the desert on a fine morning and die - if you can!

Now, however, I see the folly of attempting to hitch one's wagon to a star with a harness that does not belong to it.

I was called a terrorist yesterday... Today I am admired by the very people who said I was one.

I hate all the core stuff. That’s why I have to have a trainer. That’s the only way I’m going to do the abs work.