Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.

I was once all by myself in a house on Fire Island. Where I compared the original cast recordings of two different versions of The Wild Party. A helicopter should have descended and taken me away to a gay penal colony. But of course, I was already there.

Dysmorphia is when someone looks in the mirror, and sees something else. While I studied my own whatever I was, I decided that maybe everyone has at least a touch of dysmorphia; maybe it's impossible for anyone to ever truly know what they look like.

There is only one blasphemy, and that is the refusal to experience joy.

I just saw Titanic, which is a $200 million film about a real-life disaster at sea, but according to Hollywood Logic, none of the actual passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.

wait," I said. "so you're saying that you proposed to me because I'm a mess and I'm a person and because we need each other, while Rebecca was —— something else? I get it, I follow you, but I'm also thinking, is the bullshit getting a little deep in here?" "Yes, it is. You've caught me. And so fine, I will come clean, and I will tell you the absolutely true and naked reason why I want to marry you and only you, and not Rebecca." "Why?" "Because when I'm with you, I'm the pretty one.