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.

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

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.

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

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.