It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.

I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.

Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.

Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.

It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.