A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.