I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.