The point of books is to combat loneliness.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Ever since her diagnosis, she’s been fading like a light bulb with cancer’s hand on the rotary dimmer.

I've always liked Anna, but according to my mother, her family is complete New Money, and my grandmother has pointed out on several occasions that they're not even really Southern.

I will never have greater respect than for the man that realizes he was wrong and graciously admits it without a single excuse.

I thought I would like a job where inquiring about everyone else's private business was considered perfectly routine.

We don't drift into good directions. We discipline and prioritize ourselves there.

Martin Lawrence had no filter, and to me that was the greatest half hour of all time. Martin was ahead of his time.

My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people.

There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.