Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

When you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you...now, that’s the trick.

Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy