There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.