Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.

Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.