You gotta punch your weight.

"What I really learned from the Charlize debacle is that you gotta punch your weight. Charlize was out of my class: too pretty, too smart, too witty, too much. What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the smartest guy in the world, but certainly not the dumbest. I've read books like "The Unbearable Likeness of Being", "Angelea's Ashes", and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I understood them, I think -- they're about girls, right? -- just kidding. But I didn't like them very much. My all-time Top five favorite books are Johnny Cash's autobiography, "Snow Crash" by Neil Stevenson, "Zan and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "The Trouser Press Guide to Rock", and, I don't know... probably something Kurt Vonnegut. I look through the New Yorker when my neighbor's done with it, and I'm not adverse to going down to the Fine Arts to watch "subtitle films", although on the whole I prefer American. Top five being Blade Runner, Cool Hand Luke, the first two Godfathers which we'll count as one, Taxi Driver, and The Shining. I'm okay looking, average height, not skinny, not fat. My genius, if I can call it that, it to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame.

"You might say there are millions like me, but there aren't, really: A lot of guys have impeccable taste in music but don't read, a lot of guys read but are really fat, a lot of guys are sympathetic to women but have stupid beards, a lot of guys have Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. Some drink too much, some drive like assholes, some get into fights, of show off money, or do drugs. I don't do any of these things, really. If I do okay with women it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the ugly flaws I don't have.

"So. Charlize and I didn't match. After her I was determined to never get out of my league again."

-High Fidelity, 2000