If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically,...

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you...

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to...

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I...

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's...

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard...

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck. I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that...

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and...