The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me.

Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.

No matter what I've written, someone somewhere has come up to me and said, "Me too." The truth can be offensive, but it's always nourishing, in a way. You recognize it. You can feel it. And even if [readers] think, "My god, I would never get in those situations," within those ridiculous circumstances that I have created for myself, they know the way I respond is probably what they would do too.

I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways.