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

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

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

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

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.

Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.

It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.