Levi was smiling. He kicked her chair again.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.

Smiling is confusing, she thought. This is why I don’t do it.

Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.

I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

Emergency dance party--go away.

I don't like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I've never heard a phone ring before and I don't know what's supposed to happen next. Hello?

You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping-- her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between.

She was tired of being the one who cried.

My life changed completely in 1989 with the fall of the wall.

So, for me the town hall meetings are really an opportunity to engage in two-way dialogue with people, and they've been very helpful.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

Anger, as long as it is controlled anger, is no obstacle to efficiency. Self-control is one thing the sociopath does not usually possess. Use yours to his undoing.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

The Bible is as much a book of religion with me as the Gita and the Koran.

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.

Indeed, the Roman laws allowed no person to be carried to the wars but he that was in the soldiers roll.

When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.