“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again," he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. "It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters

Sometimes people say, do you want a drink? And I say, oh, I'd like to, but I'm a tragic alcoholic. I always say tragic. I'm a tragic alcoholic.