The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.

If someone breaks your heart, just punch them in the face. Oh sure, it seems obvious now, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't think of it when it's relevant. Seriously, punch them in the face and go get some ice cream.

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

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?"