We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.