It’s important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who’ll stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn’t think of anything better. -- unidentified soldier, eulogizing his dead buddy
It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are...
If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.
You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.
Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that ‘words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.’ That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and c...
I want to direct a movie called “Sleep” that’s sure to put everybody to the title. The whole movie will look like an extended blink. That way, if anybody asks if you’ve seen it, and you say No, you fell asleep halfway through, the other perso...
As early as 1,000 BC, man had to wait nearly 3,000 years to talk to me. And my first words to the world right out of the womb were: “Love is timeless, but man is not. I think I’m early.” It’s true. I was a premature baby. I was born generatio...
My cat likes to wake me up by licking my armpit. Never before have I had such a romantic alarm clock. It’s true, man, I should have been born Harry Truman. He could have been a memorable deodorant salesman, if he weren’t such a forgettable Presid...
My mother always told me not to pick my nose, so I’m going let the plastic surgeon decide what my new nose will look like. I’m hoping he makes it look like either a Tiffany lamp, a Heckler and Koch assault rifle, or Bill Clinton’s erect cigar.
The only good thing about all the radiation in the air is I can go on my nightly walk and wear my astronaut’s suit and not feel like an idiot. I also wear the astronaut’s suit because she told me she wanted her space, so I wear it out of love.
It was more like a movie. Everyone was wearing black, gray, or white except for her. She was in a red dress, and like a herd of bulls, the crowd was angry and made charges against her. Thankfully I was there to come to her defense, like a matador. Yo...
When I turn thirty, in thirty days or so, I might be feeling old, so I’ll probably call my grandma up, because as old as I’ll feel, she’ll be feeling older. Twelve years older.
I want to meet a woman named Sherry who only drinks brandy, and a woman named Brandy who only drinks sherry. Then I’ll offer each one of them one magical night of sex with me, in the form of two of my clones.
There was an amazing party last night. I would have asked you to come with me, but the invitation read “Guest plus one.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t sent an invitation to be able to invite someone. I wasn’t even the “plus one.” But I did get ...
The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, beca...
When someone tells me they don’t read, I like to walk up to them and stroke their hair, pet it really, because you know who also doesn’t read? My cat. In essence, these people are pitiful, and no better than pets.
I’m at a point in my life where I feel like I can’t go anywhere. Maybe I’ll try to coax my cat off my lap so I can get up and move.
I run through all the positive character qualities in my mind, and assign myself a number from 1-10 on where I think I am on each. Surprisingly I score tens on each one until the last one, confidence, where I score myself a one.
When I was a little boy, say 17 months old, I lived in the forest. I was raised by bears. We had a good time. We laughed a lot. At least I think we laughed a lot. I can’t really say, because I was too young to remember.
If one unlabeled bottle holds nonfat milk, what does the second unlabeled bottle contain? If you answered “Whole milk” then you’re obviously not ready to receive a jug of my love. So I’ll just pour it in someone else’s coffee.
I know a man who used to be a millionaire before 2007. Now he’s poor and mopping floors. But I’m not laughing, because at least he was able to get a job. Unlike me, who only has an English degree that’s not even worth the paper it’s printed o...
