"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

"They should let some people into the library by prescription only."

"In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor."

"In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from the musical Grease three times in a single day - seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or whatever - it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset."

"We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion."

"The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."

"As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen."

"No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline."

"No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way."

"We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language."

"Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time."

"It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined."

"Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."

"What's up with you? How come you're being like this?' Because it's the truth. This is the world we live in."

"And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage."

"I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears."

"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy."

"If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can."

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

"There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die."

"Skinny guys fight till they're burger."

"Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby."

"Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?"

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."

"Parenthood is the opiate of the masses."

"It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life."

"Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list."

"People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."

"If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it."

"The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill."

"During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose."

"Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us."

"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."

"Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer."

"Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold."

"By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself."

"The future is just wasted on some people."

"Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves."

"It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God."

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."

"It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling."

"If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?"

"It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.What it's going to be, I don't know.Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.And maybe knowing isn't the point.Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything."

"In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power."

"If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?'Clawing at the roof of her coffin."

"Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born."

"My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite."

"The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term "depopulate" means?"

"Sex pretty much cures everything."