Some people still think knowledge is power.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

I have a lot of money.

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

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

I think it's just a matter of time before everybody realizes that I'm kind of a romance novelist ... that these are all stories about people kind of falling back in love or struggling with relationships. Even Fight Club was just a big romantic ending.

Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.