After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

Love is a skill you learn.

The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.