The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he’s lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he’s invaded is unlikely to accept him fully.

Only very odd people don’t realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however miniscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so that to change a character’s name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it’s impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they’ll keep writing and you’ll have hanged yourself.

Another irritant is accidental rhyme, as in the sentence “When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high – me too.” Notice here that the rhyme is offensive because both rhyme words, “blew” and “too” are stressed positions; that is, the voice comes down hard on them. The rhyme is not offensive, to most ears, if the writer can get one of the rhymes out of stressed position: “The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying, me too.

I wonder which one of us God finds more uninteresting.

It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.

Were they my brothers, my uncles, those creatures shuffling brimstone-eyed from room to room, or sitting separate, isolated, muttering forever like underground rivers, each in his private, inviolable gloom?

It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it’s been worse.

Why can’t I have someone to talk to?” I said. The stars said nothing.