If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.

Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.