"I want to live fast and die young."

"People... need a time to laugh. It's up to us to bonk ourselves on the head and slip on a banana peel so the average guy can say, 'I may be bad, honey, but I'm not as much of an idiot as that guy on the screen.'"

"I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'"

"Basically, I only play one character; I just play him at different volumes."

"What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism."

"When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely."

"We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code."

"From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness."