I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

I hate that word dysfunction.

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

Nice people dont necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact it was the only fact ... The family was the houses soul.

As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Popularity has become its own justification.

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle.

To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity.

Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.

There's a big difference between sanity and insanity.

I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.

I want a world without war, a world without insanity. I want to see people do well. I don't even think it's as much as what I want for myself. It's more what I want for the people around me. That's what I want.

Acting is a way of living out one's insanity.

People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you!

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.