“He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.”

“If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.”

“Eventually Gray came in to interview me, and I gave him my official statement. "I met him at Quest. We were both looking for sex, and he invited me to join him in his motel room. I did, and we had sexual relations.""What kind of sexual relations?""I performed oral sex on him, and he did the same to me. Then we had anal intercourse.""Were you the...?" he paused, looking for the right words. "I was on the receiving end," I answered to spare him further embarrassment.(...)"And what happened this morning?""I wanted to visit him again.""Why?"I looked at Gray like he had just asked the stupidest question ever. "Why? Because I wanted to be on the receiving end of anal intercourse again.”

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.”

“He understood then that neither time nor distance had lessened his love for her.But was love that made him ache with suffering truly worth fighting for?”

“life would be perfect if girls had a mute button, guys had an delete button, bad times had a fast forward button, and good times had a pause button.”

“The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.”