Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

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.