There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.