“No, thanks. I already own a penguin.”

“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.”

“Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively… But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could ‘relate without getting close.’ For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.”

“I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.”

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”

“I'm short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own.”

“It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.”