-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we're simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time.

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

Flying to me isn't scary, it's just incredibly boring. And I guess I have a fear of boredom, so in that regard, I'm afraid to fly.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.