Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.

My wife and I thought we were in love, but it turned out to be benign

I think a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies.

My experience creatively is different than my experience in life, for, as my father would say, the simple reason that you can't get hurt when everything goes wrong creatively.

To me there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.

I am told the settlement of $5 million I am being paid is the largest amount ever paid under the New York right to privacy law