"Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto."

"Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."

"If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?"

"Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character."

"I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out."

"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."

"If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever."

"Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings"

"If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve."

"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally."

"I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met."

"Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat."

"It's just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking."

"This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight."

"Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute."

"I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer."

"At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me."

"Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?"

"I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed."

"As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts."

"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."

"I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer."

"The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence."

"All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments."

"It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America."

"The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

"Weird doors open. People fall into things."

"He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face."

"On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind."

"Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like."

"It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers."

"Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face."

"Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it."

"A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at."

"You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger."

"Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read."

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself."

significant

"Whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like."

"College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.."

"And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I'd remind him that these were pests---disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware."

"Thanks stadium pal!"

"At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface."

"Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes."

"There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents."

"In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment."

"People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American."

"I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous."