I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.

I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?

Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.

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.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him.