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.

I thought... their elegance... lies not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.

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.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

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.

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

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