I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

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

To have a mission is to find a thing that inspires you the most

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.

The new racism is anything that might hurt a Democrat politically.

I'm always working. Like a lot of creative people I can't switch off. I can't disassociate work from pleasure. My job is my hobby.

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen.

You get to the ninth inning and your stomach is clear up to here. But it's not because of your job. It is because you want to win so badly.