As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

Sometimes I don't get you,' I said. She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You never get me. That's the whole point.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

I tried--I swear I tried. But you didn't want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.

This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

"And we'll call you... hmmm. Pudge." "Huh?" "Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.