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

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.