Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.
When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, ‘It’s an honor to speak to you,’ I want to shoot myself.
September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.
I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.
If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.
There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It’s not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.
I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.
One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.