“A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?”

“A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included.”

“I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning strikes while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God's long electric fingers, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, without a pistol within reach and incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling my story, you are listening, and so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.”

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”

“How can a man live without a standard?”

“[about a hat] You can put it on and say, "Hey you, person without a hat! I've got something you don't! How did I get it? Probably by being worth more to society.”