It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff--get undercut by having to play football.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.