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

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

The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection for pot roast, hashed-brown potatoes, duck skin, butter, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, bananas and human thumb.

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

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

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.

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?