The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.

Each man kills the thing he loves.

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.