If I believe in anything when it comes to writing, and I can't stress enough that I detest writing, it's something that sticks with me not from any English class but from some awfully recondite driver's ed. seminars I had the privilege to audit during my mid-teens, and to this day I probably misunderstand it anyway. It's the term "right of way."

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

There's much too much mismating in the Microsofted phrasery of our day. And I like sentences that are societies unto themselves and shun any need for paragraphic shelter and fellowship. But I don't like seeing paper going to waste, either.

If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.

It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you--the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.

The narrators get into trouble and make fools of themselves with their perversely impulsive fondlings of the language. These people have retreated from the world, in which they keep falling short, and into language, where they fall even shorter. The narrators aggrandize their every plaint and lurid insight into verbal formations that betray their fatuity as speakers and even as hosts of their own bodies and souls.