The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.