there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.

Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.

I'm for gay elopement, not for gay weddings. I've been with my boyfriend for twenty years. I don't feel like that would validate our relationship in any way. But I would really fight for someone else to have the right. Just elope, though, please.

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

I like listening to books as well, as that way you can iron at the same time.

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."

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.