the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.

Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.