If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

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

Today, I don't want to ask for anythingI just want to give thanks for Everything I already have.

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

If you don’t want to waste your time on thinking, start reading.

O for an engine to keep back all clocks!

My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized the socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.

I go shopping for jeans, and they're playing shitty music in the store, I just leave. I can't be around music that I hate.

[Could you show us how Lana Del Rey dances in a club?] That would be illegal.

I think people who worry about planetary health on geological scales are totally misguided, that's not the point at all.

The 1970s must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty. But you can't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.