A brilliant and challenging discussion presented with extraordinary clarity.

There is no medical proof that television causes brain damage - at least from over five feet away. In fact, TV is probably the least physically harmful of all the narcotics known to man.

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind.

Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.

In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book.