Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

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.

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

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.