“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.”

“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.”

“One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.”

“It made me very sad, that question. Sad and defeated. Because I knew she knew why I was thinking about that woman—I was thinking about my own tendencies toward aloneness and I thought I could end up like that woman, with a bird perhaps, or a dog—probably a dog, I know birds are supposed to make good pets but I think there’s something creepy about them—but alone with a life that didn’t touch or overlap with anyone else’s, a sort of hermetically sealed life.”

“It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.”

“I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious.”

“I only feel like myself when I am alone.”

“I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.”