You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.