Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

I didn't have to do that much research to present a post-apocalyptic New York because I basically grew up in that New York. That old New York is gone, and that's one thing that's undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction.