The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, t...
The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.
The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profo...
Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we’d all be part of humanity’s apex. That’s about as great an accomplishment as I can hop...
So this, I suspect, is where we really begin: In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.
Q: Assume everything about your musical tastes was reversed overnight. Everything you once loved, you now hate; everything you once hated, you now love. For example, if your favorite band has always b...
People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wron...
One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we’d love to see (again) for the first time.
Metaphoric sheep get no love. There’s no worse thing to be compared to, at least among conspiracy theorists. You’re just a sheep, they will say. You believe what they want you to believe. But this imp...
Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It's the most important aspect of my that I hate.
It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.
Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.
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 instrume...
I have more CDs than 99 percent of America, but fewer CDs than 40 percent of my friends; if an acquaintance has more CDs than me, I feel intimidated and emasculated. I think about my CDs a lot. I find...
I don’t think we have any idea who we are. I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.
I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them an...
His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that’s a critical differen...
Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane Amer...
First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.
As of the writing of this particular book, I have 43 close friends,* 196 good friends,** and 2,200 affable acquaintances.****These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung can...