I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.