People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

I am not a villain.I'm an only-child narcissist monster, but I wish no ill, nor do I wish for world domination; what a hassle that would be!

I don't watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.

I think there are very few invisible musical instrument players out there who can claim the chops and sheer perseverance of Björn Türoque, the world's perennial second-place air guitar champion. Whoever this Dan Crane might be, he's captured the mad, seductive spirit of the arbitrary skill contest perfectly, and rocks it hard into the hot Finnish night. There is no number of umlauts that do this Jekyll and Hyde of air-rocking justice.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

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.