I almost never get lonely. I love being alone. I'm glad I'm married, and I love my wife. But there's never been a situation in my life where my unhappiness was based on loneliness.

It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

I guess it really didn't even dawn on me that you could be a rock critic as a job until I was maybe almost out of college. I knew criticism existed. I read Rolling Stone and Spin. Siskel and Ebert were on television. But I had absolutely no idea how to get that kind of life. And moreover, it didn't interest me that much. I just sort of read normal books growing up. I wasn't that media-conscious. I felt like the one thing I was able to do was to listen to a record and decide whether I liked it.

When I think about the future, I'm not necessarily arguing it's going to be better or worse. I'm just saying it's going to be different.

The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably.

There's this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there's some kind of critical consensus that some things are "good," and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience.