Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

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

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?

Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next...

A happy mind is also a beautiful universal mind.

It is important to realize that we so often define ourselves by what is in opposition to ourselves.

I love to cry. It's such a great release. If I'm just tired - jetlagged, I didn't get any sleep, I want to cry. I think it's important to cry.

I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.

If you don't like or care about your job, what's the big deal? I am so over it.

I think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons is a Divine instinct.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

I've been giving out chances every time and all you do is let me down.