The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: 'Large coffee with milk, please.

It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.

Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.