“Maybe my friends could help, though I’d never heard them talk about boxing, and most of them were hopeless drug addicts, good for only a couple of hours. I was hopeless, but prided myself on being good for more than a couple of hours. I still had what my father called get-up-and-go. Also, I was in possession of a positive outlook, which is just a trick whereby you convince yourself that the desolation of your world is a phase in your personal growth.

"The weird thing is it works.”
—"The Worm in Philly,“ Sam Lipsyte

“There was something tremendously good about sitting there and not looking out for Hayley, a habit he’d decided to break. He didn’t even know the train schedule tonight. The trains could do what they like. He would take an evening off from feeling incomplete without her. He’d done this shit so far on his own, and if Hayley had been there he would have tried to scrape her, day and night, for pity and understanding. She would have been empty by now, empty and seething, but still he would have kept scraping with his spoon, digging deep into her sweetest parts until they were completely gone.”
–"The Dark Arts,“ Ben Marcus

“Thanks for your submission, please try again soon
We value your commitment, don’t call us, we’ll call you
Thanks for your submission, please try again soon
We’d love to help you, if you just pay your dues 
Thanks for your submission, please try again soon
We value your commitment, don’t call us, we’ll call you
Thanks for your submission, please try again soon
We value your commitment but we can’t help you.”
—"Ain’t Fair,“ Deap Vally 

“‘I love, love, fucking love sponsored content,’ said news and entertainment reader Erica Olson, adding that when she can tell a corporation is financially behind a piece of writing, she is even more inclined to click on it. ‘First off, it’s cool. That’s not debatable. Second, I don’t find it in any way insulting to my intelligence. In fact, it makes me feel smarter. And third, did I mention that sponsored content is just really fucking cool?’”
–The Onion, May 17

“This is where support and advice and help and patronage will sometimes lead you: Down the primrose fucking path to writing a piece or a screenplay or a book about something that, while you might be capable of writing it, will turn out just as bland, worthless and repetitive as every other bit of bland, worthless, repetitive horse shit that crowds the shelves of those dying chain bookstores and plays on repeat at those mammoth movie theaters or sits unhappily between the perfumey pages of some of the not-very-good lady magazines.”
—Ask Polly: Jesus, My Struggling Writer Friends Never Shut Up, The Awl

“Linda Fargo (right), the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, wrapped her silver hair with a band of barbed wire. Asked if the barbed wire hurt, she said, ‘Not enough.’”
—When I Think of True Punk Rock I Think of Vogue and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 6, 2013

“Hating The Great Gatsby (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.

"Classics always have many things wrong with them, especially by contemporary standards. To enumerate defects is to miss the point—

like complaining that a painting isn’t clear & vivid to the eye because your own shadow has fallen over it.”
—@joycecaroloates