I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.

You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

The difference between sex and death is, death you can do alone and nobody laughs at you.

My parents stayed together for forty years. But that was out of spite.

Do I believe in God? I did until Mother's accident. She fell on some meat loaf and it penetrated her spleen.

If there is reincarnation, I'd like to come back as Warren Beatty's fingertips.

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.