Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life. That's the hope, anyway.

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.

You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say, 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you're being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with little fanfare, those moments. They're not particularly photogenic. There's no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill. No folk dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of- just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.