Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

Laughter always forgives.

I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.