“I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.”

“I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.”

“Aside from the possible scientific explanations for the death of ballsiness, there is an economic one, which I think may be the real cause: high rents. It's very hard to be a ballsy writer when you can't afford to live anywhere. It makes you absolutely nervous and insane and takes all yours guts away. I have to say this is the case for yours truly. If I could pay a 1954 rent of fifty-eight dollars a month, I might actually be a ballsy writer. But I'm so crippled by my enormous twenty-first century rent that I can barely get out of bed, let alone raise hell, which is what you need to do to qualify as a ballsy writer. You have to be a hell-raiser. You have to care about political things and you have to be able to afford booze, not to mention days lost to hangovers. But if you're worried all the time about having to go live with your parents as a thirty-seven-year-old, then to hell with hell. You only have one goal: to come up with the rent. You don't have time for political causes or all-night orgies.”

“Unfortunately, I'm one of those idiots who knows everything about health and is in a constant state of alarm, and yet I continue to do everything I shouldn't do.”

“I wondered where the person was who had taken my place, who wanted to know what news people had been told. I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me.”

“Insightful and heartbreaking, but also wonderfully comedic in its gutsy honesty. A beautiful and powerful memoir.”

“Try to think about more important things,' he said. 'Think about your soul, your character. Think about the freezer. It's a solid block of ice. It needs defrosting. There might a steak in there. Concentrate on things like that. There could be a meal in it.”