I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.