“Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.”

“I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials”

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”

“Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off”

“Give that mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can't at least be polite, you don't get a treat.”

“I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don't even get that.”