“It is a terrible thing for an author to have a lot of people running about his book without any invitation from him at all.”

“There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.”

“Book light,” Grandma grumbles as I hurry her away from Dad’s boss and his wife. “Who the hell wantsa book light?”“Lots of people,” I say. “They are very handy things to have.”

“You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal.”

“Another funny thing about having friends was that they expected things of you. they made you want to not be a terrible, awful, execrable person. They made you feel worse when you were one. It was a lot easier not to have any friends.”

“people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.”