We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.

To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.

I would say 70 percent of people who are in therapy are in therapy not because of their upbringing, not because of their mean sister or obsessions, but because of anxiety brought about by lack of financial security.

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.

When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.

I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.