Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

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

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

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

The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.