Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Do not underestimate objects.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

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

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.