“Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.”

“...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar.”

“It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.”

“The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy.”

“The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy) If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don’t belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling? Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance.”

“It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.”

“The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.”