I hate that word dysfunction.

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

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.

I'm originally from Tampa and grew up on beach. I'm also naturally fair-skinned. The funny thing is, my parents are both pretty tan, but for some reason I didn't get those genes.

toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.

We can never be born enough.

We get what we deserve. They are our elected officials.

It is much easier to wear a cross than to bear a cross.

Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

I learn all these things about the record talking about it after it's finished.