I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people.

I found the idea of being a librarian very appealing--working in a place where people had to whisper and only speak when necessary. If only the world were like that!

They're both about the correct or proper way to do something. There is a correct and proper way to use words and there is a correct and proper way to behave with other people. And I behaved improperly with John and feel bad, so I compensate by obsessing with language, which is easier to control than behavior.

One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.

Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.

I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people.