I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your...

Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)

Why do you want to be on The Real World?-Because I want everyone to witness my youthWhy?-Isn’t it gorgeous?

I am myself a failed cartoonist,

When you’re in your twenties in a new city where no one’s from here, we’re all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with...

You can’t ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It’s the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.

No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn’t at all expect, especially from our devoutly Catholic mother: they had both left instructions that their bodies be donated to...

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for...

It’s our theory that everything trickles down from there, … That if you have high salaries, good conditions, you have good support. You have a lot of communication between teachers, you pay for teachers’ supplemental...

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences,...

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello...

I am myself a failed cartoonist, There are a million reasons to ruin things.

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant – children so seldom know...

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the...

I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having...

The kids sit facing the white board and collectively tell a story, … As they’re coming up with the story, there’s a typist sitting here, so they see their words coming up on the wall.

All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.

Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans — neither fearing the loss of the other.

Who’s got the Paris Review? … It’s under a new editor.

You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there.

The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries...

I try to get anybody coming to San Francisco to come to the Mission. Not to misuse the word ‘authentic’ – I think that’s such a troubling word – but the Mission really does have...

Maybe he hadn’t thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn’t accounted...

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short...

The house is a factory.

If things continue this way, there will be two societies – or at least I hope there will be two – the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk...

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the...

I am the Olympics.

I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I’m very happy.

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

I’d rather people just borrow the idea and do their own thing in their own community, … Whenever people can just start on their own, without our imprimatur, all the better. The model works, but...

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued...

Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it’s some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable...

I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.

I will tell these stories…because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost...

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we’re losing the...

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford...

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.