By David Himmel

• I like bookstores. I like local bookstores. I like Volumes Bookcafe in Wicker Park. But Volumes is the kind of bookstore Emily Giffin would write if she was describing a trendy, punk bookstore in the hipster part of town in one of her romantic chick lit novels. “There’s a coffee bar in the bookstore and the baristas have tattoos. Claire wondered how many of those tattoos were inspired by heartbreak. ‘Maybe,’ Claire thought, ‘I should get a tattoo.’”

• I don’t have the energy to be annoyed anymore. But that doesn’t stop me from being annoyed.

• When opportunity is knocking, it’s usually a delivery guy with the wrong address.

• The problem with telling the truth is that there are so many moving parts. You gotta tell the truth anyway. Unless you’re writing a novel. Then lie your goddamn ass off. Just make it feel true.

• I feel the need to tell someone that loneliness is my muse.

• If you’re in front of an audience and behind a microphone, and you sit down because you’re “tired” you should not be behind that microphone and you do not deserve that audience.