Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his other's grave, but no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?