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.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.