...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10-12 hours a day. And I mean, the difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything. And I certainly never - I never trained seriously after the age of 16.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.