To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.