You're a product of our language, and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out.The world is your cradle and your trap.

I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

I learned all those jokes in second grade. Second grade is really where they tell you those horrific jokes, racist jokes and misogynistic jokes that you have no idea what they mean, and you just memorize them because they have a very strong effect, they make people laugh in this kind of nervous, horrible way, and it's only later that you realize that you've got a head full of crap.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine