Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

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

We see them most when we are o nnthe outside looking in

She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

Being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.

I wish that author [ E. L. James] all the success in the world. It's just not for me.

I'm not sure what [my latest works are] about but I'm convinced they're the best things I've done and I'm going to the world's best museums with them.

A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.

I wouldn’t be without my regular schedule of chiropractic adjustments because of my very strenuous schedule.

It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks.