I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.

Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.

I should hex the IRS.

No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

Anybody see 'Cop Land'? I went to go see it, but I got stoned in the parking lot. And then on the way in, I read the marquee, and I got paranoid and went home.

You've really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you're sunk.

Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Color, form - all these are the work of Lucifer.

Maybe the greatest madness is to see life as it is rather than what it could be.

He is not sweet or gentle or particularly kind. But he is smart and brave, and even though he saved me, he treated me like I was strong. That is all I need to know.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

Plausibility is a trap for the truth laid by lies.