I don't understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.

Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.

I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.

We've come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you've been tagged in somebody else's photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.

Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it's not merely that you don't need anyone - it's that you don't know how to need anyone.