But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.