I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I've discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, "I want to love, I want to live.

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, "Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl."

If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.

It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

I was the type of person who was the question-asker. And not just genuine questions, I would ask a question so the author would know how much I knew about them. Once I went to a Tobias Wolff reading. I knew he was teaching at Syracuse at that time. And so, I remember asking him how he liked Syracuse. People do that to me now and it's okay. There is rarely a time when I just have had enough.