It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day.

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.