“She's got a way of making a man feel guilty for certain things he'd never feel bad about on his own, like watching someone shoot himself in the face.”

“What you'll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting people. That's going to be a problem.”

“When she called her brother, Buster said that she should climb out the window of the bathroom and run away, which was his solution to most problems.”