What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?

You can't go into the office and be a jerk. You can't yell at your kids or your wife or your husband for no reason. That makes you a terrible person.

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.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.

Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.

People can demand someone they've never met be arrested and thrown in jail forever because they know it's never going to happen and they're never going to see this person.

What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.