New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.

The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.

Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.

It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.

You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them; it makes me want to hug them.

Torch songs are confessions. They are an expression of feeling that cannot be concealed or contained or minimized. They are marked by anguish, yes, but also by yielding.

The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.

Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

Tomorrow will be a better day, we shall be safe ...only if we are safe today to reach tomorrow, things would change with a brighter light.

You know what we call pedestrians in Morganville? Mobile bloodbanks.

How can I be lost, if I've got nowhere to go?

Please don't continually say I'm paranoid.Why?It makes me paranoid.

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.

The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.