“His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.”

“Buster closed his eyes, held his breath, and, before he realized that the gun had been fired, a gust of heat and wind passed over him and deconstructed the beer can atop his head, the sound of something irrevocably giving up its shape and becoming, in an instant, something new.”

“He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.”

“She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children.”

“People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a super villain that he wasn't sure he could go through with it.”

“You are very sweet," she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, "but it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.”

“He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.”