Intelligence alone can't make a good writer and style alone can't make a good writer - that is, not a really important or significant writer - but the two things together make a really good writer.

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived

If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

Of course people couldn't help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.