“If I’m at a party where I’m not enjoying myself, I will put some cookies in my jacket pocket and leave without saying good-bye.”

“I have cookies.”“Cookies?” My brows rose.“Yeah, and I made them. I’m quite the baker.” For some reason, I couldn’t picture that. “You baked cookies?”“I bake a lot of things, and I’m sure you’re dying to know all about those things. But tonight, it was chocolate and walnut cookies. They are the shit if I do say so myself.”

“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”

“I’m ready to stop saying good-bye to things. I’mgoing to start saying hello.”

“Put me down, I’m too heavy.”“You’re small enough to fit in my pocket.”

“I don’t struggle because I was always the stupidest kid in the class and the idea that I would ever be brilliant was knocked out of me in the third grade. So I’m not sitting around trying to be brilliant, or Shakespeare. I’m just trying to get the work I have in my head down on the page in the best way I possibly know how without putting that horrible pressure on myself of saying I’m going to write it today and in 200 years at Princeton they will be studying these words.” Yeah, I want my stuff to be as good as I can conceivably make it, but I am not going to put that on my head”