It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.

America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!

freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.