People will listen to you only when they know you're dying, otherwise they're just waiting for their turn to talk.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.