Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

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

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

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.

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.