I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don't think that’s a novel’s goal or responsibility.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.

There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

Your heart is able to see things that your eyes aren't able to.

No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self

People nearly always believe, and are willing to back it up with weapons and cruelty, that their religion and way of life is better than the other person's

Ask me. I'm a cow expert.

Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

You can get through your whole day only around people who will tell you that you're wonderful. But pretty soon they're going to have to be lying about that.

We need a Napoleon. An Alexander. Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself a dictator, and died for it.

I may be biased, but I think jackals are cute and cuddly, even if they were known for digging up graves in Ancient Egypt.

Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.