I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn't want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

I spend so much time like living in the past or the future. I mean, I think most people do, really. And the moments when you're really present in your life can be pretty rare, really.

Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

You really burden the reader if you put things in but, "Oh, it's not interesting, but I'll put it in anyway." Then the reader's going to think, like, "Mmm... no thanks." So the thing is to cut all that stuff out before its published.