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.

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.

Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good reasons.

I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.