My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about th….

To conform is to lose your soul.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all ….

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense..

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes fo….

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes iden….

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed..

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything..

A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth..

Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone e….

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth ….

She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self….

I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary ….

The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time o….

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making..

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen..

I don't actually think of the internet as the bad guy. I think of the internet as doing a hell of a lot of wonderful, fascinating, interesting things….

The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional ….

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be..

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns..

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates..