sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.