Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

I go silent so I can write. When my tongue is wagging my fingers are silent.

The sun stopped shining for me is all.

Failures are in the positions they are in today because they are yet to follow the footprints of those who walk, think, and breathe success.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.

Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.

Busted is not the ideal band I'd like to be in by any stretch of the imagination.

We live in what's called an open society, which of course means they open our emails, open our phone records, and open our medical records.

We are dismayed when we find that even disaster cannot cure us of our faults.

Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.