Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

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.

In truth, I doubt I'd notice if a herd of giant Irish elk stomped through the entire chamber when I'm in the act of lovin' you, Lainna!

You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

I guess my guitar parts are usually precise, but the execution of those parts is downright treacherous, since I'm not very good on guitar.

I'm getting better at it everyday.

You've been thinking and I've been drinking.

Oh yes. You’ve caught me. I confess. My sole purpose in life is to gleefully, willfully, maniacally destroy all of your precious chrome babies.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

Concentration is sometimes mistaken for grumpiness.

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

Whatever you do, don't smoke.