I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.