I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.