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

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

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

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.