“With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.”

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.

Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.

And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

I couldn’t wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.

We went from apartment to apartment by ourselves. One of the best memories I had was when we moved into our first apartment, no bed, no furniture and we just sat in the living room and just hugged each other. We thought we made it.

His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.

When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent’s apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in.

If it’s putting on a great dance record and rocking out in your apartment, do it. If kissing someone for 10 minutes makes you feel confident, do it.

I first heard Laura Branigan sing live in my brother Nesuhi’s apartment, where we had gone because he had a very good piano. I immediately realized that she had a great pop voice, in the classical sense.

I’m a teenager, but I’m independent – I have my own apartment, I have my own life.

I love Obama. He’s my favorite president of all time. I have a giant picture in my apartment in New York that is of his Chicago Tribune cover, Mr. President.