The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.

Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?