Mediocrity is contextual.

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

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

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.