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

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.

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.

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.

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.