But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

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

Your actions will always be what the world sees, but people who choose to see through God's eyes will always have the compassion to understand why.

Darkness is my friend, and my biggest enemy" Temporary dark and deep

I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can never be spent.

You have to have a certain persona to be a star, you know, and I don't have that. I'm a banana.

Life is very short; be willing to serve.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Until philosophers hold power, neither states nor individuals will have rest from trouble.

I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn't have to go so fast.

The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.