By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.
Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.
Toby Keith writes songs like 1993′s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” and what’s compelling is that you can’t deconstruct its message. “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” is not like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real.
I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of ’80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.
What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer.
The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.
But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living.
Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.
Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.
We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it’s almost like the other people can’t see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.
To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that’s so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it.
We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.
People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.
We are always dying, all the time. That’s what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
I almost never get lonely. I love being alone. I’m glad I’m married, and I love my wife. But there’s never been a situation in my life where my unhappiness was based on loneliness.
First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.
Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.