Fraud makes the world go round.

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.