I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.

Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.