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

the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

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

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more.) ... when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense.