"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love."

"Humility is considered an un-masculine quality."

"98% of the people in the world are harmless and wish you well, but it only takes one person who doesn't. That's what you're constantly on guard against."

"Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet."

"Privacy is something I have come to respect. I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring."

"I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it."

"I don't think I'd ever be cruel to an animal."

"The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry."

"Sex is great until you die, but it's never as great as it was when you were a kid, when it was a mystery."

"Willie Mays was the best ever. When I was in college I once made a catch like the one Mays made over his head. Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night I think about it. It still makes me warm."

"You're raising a kid and you give it food and shelter and, most importantly, you give it the feeling that it's special. I think people react to celebrities like that - I mean, they treat celebrities like children."