The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.

And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.

There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.

Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.

Okay is BURSTING with sensuality