“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the...”

“I have to return some videotapes”

“Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.”

“I want to stay," and then, more weakly, "Need some more sun."A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn't slap at it. It doesn't go away."But there's no sun, dude." I tel...”

“what's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.”

“The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”

“We scarified a mosquito. I bet that's what did it. It was probably a virgin too.”

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

“I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is pos...”

“No second chances in the land of a thousand dances, the valley of ten million insanities.”

“Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland sepa...”

“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.Michel de Montaigne”