All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.