I don’t want to dream through our lives together, don’t want to sleep in, don’t want to put on my sunglasses and pretend that life’s a vacation. The fantasy is that I want to exist in reality; the fantasy is to be there for someone on a Sunday morning but also on a Tuesday night, when the haze and laze of the weekend has worn thin and seems far away as ever.

It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

Life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.

All reading should be nonrequired. At least for the true reader—for reading is a natural function, much like breathing. If every book we encounter is a blind date, then love stories statistically will be outnumbered by the disappointments. But for the true reader, curiosity becomes an essential spiritual function and mystery its ultimate goal. In our books, we seek not answers, really, to that nebulous longing our heart feels eternally; we actually seek the great questions.

It always fascinated me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all, nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me, I have a tendency to break up first before I get to hear the whole thing. Here it is. One more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really love this one. When I think that its over, that I’ll never see him again like this… well yes, I’ll bump into him, we’ll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together, then we’ll slowly think of each other less and less until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same for me. Break up, break down. Drunk up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around. Forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love, desperately look everywhere and after two years of loneliness meet a new love and swear it is the one, until that one is gone as well. There’s a moment in life where you can’t recover any more from another break-up. And even if this person bugs you sixty percent of the time, well you still can’t live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face, well you love his sneezes more than anyone else’s kisses.

I just can’t fall out of love with this place. I’ve teased about, ‘Oh I’m gonna move to Berlin or I’m gonna move to London.’ But I think I know in my gut that I’ll be here ‘til the day I die. That sort of thing, you know? I can’t relate when people say, ‘Oh, I wanna move to the country. I really need to breathe. I really need to relax.’ The idea of going on vacation is like, that is hell on earth for me. Cocaine always sounds nice too until you do it and then you feel like shit afterwards. But like coke, leaving New York is all the same shit. It all makes you feel awful.

It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest and best things you will ever do.

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

Desperation is like a spilled drink: even if it’s delicious, no one will get near it. Cultivate an aura of glamorous unapproachability.

Love is like Downton Abbey: the first season is delightfully breathless, although some characters see war brewing and then the second season gets a little dull, and you start to make bets on who’s going to die.

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence.

This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go.

Travel is so rewarding that it should take precedence over other things younger people spend money on.