It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

You're smarter than TV. So what?

When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.

I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

Those Catholics, they really nab you when you're young. They sear you. They sear you; they do.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?

I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.

Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

I think the killers get far too much attention.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

Fate is for losers.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

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.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?