I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

The bullshit never ends. That’s the main thing to remember. It never ends.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.

You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?