I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

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

Frailty, thy name is woman!—A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she follow'd my poor father's body, Like Niobe, all tears:—

I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back.

Mankind is at its best when it is most free.

When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

Pictures all around, of how good a life should be, a model for the rest, that bred insecurity, I walked a jagged line and then came back for more, it's always in my mind, an institution with no law.

Boys are the cash of war.

I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them.

Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.

There are so many kinds of awful men One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.