"They’ll go on. Looking older than their years, because stolen or faked happiness gets hard on a body. Never thinking of you again."

"Sometimes one section goes out and then the rest, but what matters is there’s going to be darkness at some point."

"Whenever his table saw was spinning, he’d let his voice free to cut straight through it."

"Whatever reasons you have for wishing to feel the things you once did? You keep those to yourself.”

On the writer's aversion to—and need for—connection.

"It’s a scientific fact that time speeds up with age, I say. A year is 4.3% of my lifetime. It is only 2.3% of your lifetime."

"She has my blood taken, just in case, to run tests, but she’s sure of it: I have a cold in my butt."

"You know at a concert how everybody surges forward when the artist comes on stage? We take two steps back."

"To say I built a twin phone booth would be misleading."

"The barns groan, hundreds of cows chewing and shitting and sleeping and bellowing and humping. Not a lot of people know the cows hump."

"I always find her, and all the hope settles in the soles of my feet, weighing me down until I can’t lift my legs."

On keeping things fun as possible, for long as possible.

"Jeff: am I still too old to claim I’m too young, to keep anything from going wrong?"

"But we work with what we got, and sometimes, the only light we have is projecting blood and sex in a celluloid showcase."

"This is all I ever wanted, really: to be Lou Reed, tripping on disco biscuits, holding all of history rapt in a mirrorball shadow."

"Love, so ordinary it stars every song. It’s boring, how every couple in love thinks they invented it."

"We don’t dissolve, disasters can’t touch us, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, like we know The Way, we aim for the sky and we’ll live forever."

"Here I am, the lovesick blues boy, singing the same old tune, the one with all the suffering in it."

On launching, gratitude, and honouring our influences.

"The sex club opens its jaws—human-sized plastic fangs and a whiplash leather tongue out of concrete—swallowing the two new friends whole."