Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

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

Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge, let's go!

I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.

I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one.

There is no moral distinction between petty thievery and 'from each according to ability, to each according to need.'

Let choice whisper in your ear and love murmur in your heart. Be ready. Here comes life.

I liked to explore different arts. But when I started acting, I knew this was the medium I want to be in for the rest of my life. Stories onscreen affect me the most.

Pride fills me. I am sick with the pride that destroyed me.

Sever the edge between before and after.

Don't wait for someone to green light your project, build your own intersection.