I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.

In depression, you're flattened. Your energy level is gone. When I'm anxious, I tend to have more energy. But it depends on the nature of the anxiety. The anxiety to finish something would seem to be more productive than the anxiety that says, "You're feeling sick."

My friends and I sometimes laugh at each other that there is so much maintenance of a body. I paid no attention when I was younger.

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

Jokes are great capsules of information. I think they should never be censored. They often are offensive - and we're offended by different things - but I believe deeply in what Freud wrote of their relationship to the unconscious, which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That's what laughing is: a release.

People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.