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

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

That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.

Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

A good story isn't the one that shuts everyone down and sort of leaves them in silent awe. A good story is one that, even before you finish the anecdote, you can see their eyes shining because it has so resonated with something from their own lives that everyone in the group has a version of the same story and they cannot wait to tell it, and that they're going to compete to make their version even more extreme than your version. So your version is just a seed.

Abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as possible is always a goal of mine.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.