Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

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.