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

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

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

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.