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..

The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim….

The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men ne….

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

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, bl….

A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion..

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both..

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

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 b….

We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our ow….

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason..

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc..

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality..

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 pun….

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time..

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage..

Nothing is more subtly destructive than a closed circle of artists feeding on one another. Envy grows from insignificant differences between people, ….

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a lang….

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….

Adultery is the vice of equivocation. It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is ….

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..