When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.

if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

The right idea is the one you can't stop thinking about; the one that's in your head first thing in the morning.

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.

I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.

You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

Here are the things I know for sure: When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong. Things that break—be they bones, hearts, or promises—can be put back together but will never really be whole. And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you’ve never known. I learn this over and over again,

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time.

I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.

People are always afraid of the unknown - and banding together against the Thing That Is Different From Us is a time-honoured tradition for rallying the masses.

I think libraries are an important part of the community. If it wasn't for librarians recommending our books to people coming into the library unsure of what to read, where would authors be? I really applaud this community for being so serious about giving to their libraries.

You have to create characters who will whisk people away from their ordinary lives.

The thing that most people didn't understand...was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone, forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

People in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away ?" I look away from her. "It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.

The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.

Public transportation is like a magnifying glass that shows you civilization up close.

Sometimes we get bored and want to shake up our format. It's a luxury we have on public access - no one cares about us. It literally doesn't matter if we fail, so sometimes we try to go really big and out of the box.

Northern New Jersey looks like a cluster of idyllic suburbs, but each of those seemingly normal towns has a dark side that's constantly gossiped about but never publicly acknowledged. They seem to thrive on their strangenesses.

The street I lived on for the first handful of years of my life was lined with modest, lower-middle-class houses with small front yards and cracked driveways - your typical North Jersey neighborhood, with all the odd hidden darkness that that implies.

As a largely unsuccessful comedian, I've become someone that younger people sometimes find and ask for advice, which I'm happy to give, even though it makes me feel old.

I always think all the other comedians in New York hate me - I'm just convinced that they all dislike me - when, generally, I think I'm a pretty well-respected guy.

I had bedbugs in 2005. I felt like a leper. Worse than a leper. At least lepers had a colony they could go and live in with other people who empathized. I instead had friends stand up from tables and walk out of restaurants when I told them I had bedbugs, because they were afraid I'd transfer the bugs to them.

Cops in New York City don't have the best reputation. It's a fast-paced city, and they deal with a lot, and many people have seen lots of cops interact with the public utilizing what can be gently called 'not the best customer service.'

When people ask me, 'Why don't you drink?' I usually smile and say 'Because I'm not good at it.'

My medications make me easier to deal with. They don't interfere with my creativity or turn me into a zombie or dull my real personality. They help me connect with people, allow me to stay calm when situations seem overwhelming, and help keep my thoughts from racing out of control. They help me leave the house when I'm scared to. They help.

I very classically would go into manic phases, which were as dangerous, if not more so, than the depressed phases, and I think I'd come up with the best ideas I ever had, and then the next day, I'd look at them and be like, 'This is nonsense,' because it was born out of a manic episode. What a waste of time.

'What if?' is just about the worst question I can ask myself, and I want to avoid it at all costs for the rest of my life.

The stereotype of New Yorkers is that we're people who avoid warm human interaction, we're always in too much of a rush to enjoy simple things, and that we're just generally rude.

When I was growing up, I think I was expected to be seen and not heard. You're this little, nerdy kid; no one wants to hear about how sad you are. Nobody wants to hear that you feel lonely.

I grew up a loser, and I always felt like one, but I turned out pretty okay. I may be living proof that you can spend your whole life feeling like you're falling down a set of steps and still maybe land on your feet at the bottom.

My sadness compels me to hide it so that people won't judge me. Seeking help would have blown my cover. Meanwhile, my mania convinces me that it's making me fun so I'll want to dive further into it. Seeking help would've ruined that good time.

If I pretended to be confident all the time, that would just be a lie.

I moved to Queens from New Jersey in 2004 and have continued to stick with New York to such a degree that when people ask me to explain it, I'm sometimes unable to provide an answer.

I will never forget what happened on August 14, 2003. I know the exact sequence of where I was for every moment of that evening. It was a tragic day, and it's burned into my memory. Many people might remember that date, vaguely, as the date of the infamous eastern seaboard blackout that plunged all of New York City into darkness.

Even though I live in New York, I still have this Jersey thing where I feel like I have to prove myself. I'm grateful for any chance I get to be the least talented person in the room, because it'll make me work that much harder.

There's a teacher at the Renzo Gracie Academy in New York named John Danaher. He's leading this whole group of fighters named the Danaher Death Squad, and they're revolutionizing how that world works. I actually went and signed up for classes mostly because, man, if there's innovation like that happening in New York, I want to be around it.

I'm a pescatarian.

As a stand-up, as a storyteller, as an improviser, I've done thousands of shows. They allow me to work out new material that might turn into something later. They let me keep my muscles sharp for when the rent-paying gigs do come along. They keep me sane.

I think one of the things about listening is that it's always at its most powerful when it's present, when it's right here, when it's right now. And that's a lesson about improv that I think just made me a much more social person.

New Yorkers will be rude, but at least they do so out of the rationale that everyone around them is always slowing them down. Los Angeles, I learned, is a city full of people who have the personality of the coolest pretty boy from your eighth-grade class.

I do know I've lived through a bunch of things that people would maybe prefer I keep behind closed doors.

I think so often about how, when I was starting out at UCB, Conan O'Brien was in town, and on his show back then, they sometimes did character bits, and I started getting paid to dress up as a page or a Dutch boy on his show.