I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,"and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.

Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.

After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?