It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.