Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

Love and honesty don’t mix.

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

I transform fiction into memory.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

I like who I am when I'm with her. And I hope that she feels the same way. If she doesn't, we shouldn't be together, no matter how I feel about it.

Libertarians believe consenting adults have the right to do whatever they choose, except band together.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.

You can be strapped to the most stable chair and still feel the world give way beneath you.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing

Look, I hate good-byes, too. But sometimes, we need them just to survive.

We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything.

All my adult life people have been helping me.