Status Updates From In the Land of Men: A Memoir

"My preference was to not have to deal with people if I could help it."

"Hearing about these various traumas was helpful in a very important way, though. They introduced me to one of the most important aspects of the editor's job: defusing writer rage."

"Our novels were now internal monologues - the dream world of the self."

"Power is also invisible when you have it. But you can't see anything straight if you're too close - you keep losing your perspective."

They didn't care in any way, shape or form. 30 years later, they still don't

So glad Miller skipped ahead chronologically:
David Foster Wallace: "She looks quite a bit more like Brent Musburger than I'm comfortable with."

I keep hoping Miller won't go all "he was my friend," and maybe she won't

"The week before Thanksgiving, I committed myself to review Infinite Jest for GQ. (By that point, somehow, and probably unwisely, I could review anything I wanted to review.)"

"What we didn't know was that power was the motivator."

"Everyone should always bring truffles with them all the time."

I guess it was too much to hope this was a funny story...

Kafka wrote in a letter 'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?'

"The [book] reviewer's job is to evaluate the book on its own terms and to determine how well the book succeeds - or doesn't, as the case may be - within those terms."

"Failure, I learned early on, is a crucial part of the game, and anyone who does anything worth doing in the world is going to fail, and fail quite a lot."

"I learned that each unreal relationship is its own Prospero's island and that dreaming and unreality keep you on your island. I learned, too, that the false dream is better enacted than actually lived."

I'm five years younger than Adrienne Miller, but I chose drug addicts to share my Prospero's island. Both the false dream and the actually lived were as abysmally bad

"We never really see our own limitations, even when everyone else does. Our subjective self always exceeds our objective self, meaning you always know your own possibilities, even when no one else does.
Or, to put it another way: if you are a woman, you will always be underestimated."

"What if adult life was a game you couldn't win?"

"Almost no one makes any kind of logical, unified sense, and very few people fit together into an integrated whole. All we really have are projections of other people: impressions of character, phantasms of character - vague ideas that may or may not be connected to reality."