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

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

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each – eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

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 for honest communication.

I don’t write directly on to the computer because I don’t think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I’m moving words around on screen.

To conform is to lose your soul

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.

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

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 the commerce only late in the game.

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

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

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 wasting it on.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don’t like traveling. I feel like it’s a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

I think it’s a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

I’ve always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting – an artist – or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

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 ways I’m alienated from society.

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 meaning for me behind the effort.

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

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

The office is a romantic enabler because you’re always around the person you have a crush on. There’s no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there’s an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.