“There’s a gift in your lap and it’s beautifully wrapped and it’s not your birthday.”

I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn’t sustain my interest.

I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.

and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.

As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.

A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you’re that important.

I want to be violated by insight.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.