Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.