The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again.

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