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.

The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

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

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.

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.

The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.