“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.”

“Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.”

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”

“More is happening out there than we are aware of.It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”

“I should like a parsley sandwich.To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.”

“We did I think talk about your feeling of it's fun to be square, and while I'll go along with the Borges-like ramifications, I don't think I was the one who thought it up. In the past my justification for my self-conscious oddness of appearance (by now I figure this is the way I look, and it would not only be more self-conscious but also uncomfortable to change) was that people would think their impression of oddity came simply from the way I looked, and eventually become (hopefully) pleasantly surprised that I was not nearly as much of a nut as I looked, and was really quite ordinary, which is also true I think. It seemed preferable to people thinking 'Well, he looked perfectly ordinary and then it became apparent there was something wrong with his head...' Of course now practically everybody to my middle aged way of thinking looks too peculiar for words, and only very infrequently attractive at the same time.”

“Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.”