“I like how cats’ ears can flip inside out. It’s as if they’re saying, Keep talking, human, but I’m not even listening.”

“Dear cat, your ears are flipped inside out, so I know you’re not listening to a word I’m not saying.”

“Maybe I could hear better if my ears weren’t flipped inside out. Unlike a cat’s ears, you can’t tell mine are flipped over. But they must be, because I only seem to listen to myself.
”

“People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.”

“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging.”

“Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.”