In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

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

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.