Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

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

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

I tried to think of a witty play on Every picture tells a thousand words, but then the whole word/picture thing collapsed on me.