Silence is the unbearable repartee.

When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, ‘It’s an honor to speak to you,’ I want to shoot myself.

Artists are never complete people. But if it’s art that completes them, then what is taken away?

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.

Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.

I’ve always admired stylists. I put the writers of bumphable, ready-to-wear prose, calculated to sell, guaranteed not to shock, in the same category as artists who can’t draw. There is a lack of bravery and a lot of fraud in them. I have tried never to write a book that didn’t attempt something new in the way of narrative technique. Writing is an assault on cliche. I find little to admire in writers who make no attempt at originality.

It’s true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

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.

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.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.