If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know.

I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?

It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else.

It felt like there was a whole world living inside her. I didn’t know anything about that world.

Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.

I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.

And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.

I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have any friends.

I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.