When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.

Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?

...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.

The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: “suicide.

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Nothing goes perfectly, especially when you're opening a restaurant.

But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.

This is my own little rock theory: In my mind, Nirvana slayed the hair bands. They shot the top off the poodles.

It's a real pleasure to go to work when you're in the most extraordinary surroundings, and working with people who are young and interested and creatively keen.

I believe that I am some sort of fiction writer and I'm using myself in my work because I'm the person I'm most convenient to use!

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help.

You double your intensity with skill.