All over the world, relationships between men and women are very, very tricky and very difficult and you don't learn anything. It's not an exact science, so you can't learn anything. You're always going by instinct and your instinct betrays you because you want what you want when you want it.

Love may be the answer, but even though you're watching for the solution, intercourse raises some rather interesting thoughts.

Geez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

None of the arts are any good unless you really are great at them.

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.

The most important words in the English language are not 'I love you' but 'it's benign.'