Women are an alien race set down among us.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.