If you’re the type of person who wants to associate exclusively with those who perfectly mirror your own ethical worldview, you’re reducing significantly the scope of your potential life experience.

All my friends are rock critics, so we talk about rock criticism a lot. Because of that, in order to be part of the conversation, you have to have an awareness of what the discussion is.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would see her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. 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.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.