The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.