Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.

As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible -- sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.

Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental -- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.