“There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.”

“It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.”

“They came out in a dim, damp basement - a generic sort of place, full of moulding boxes. 'You take me to the nicest places,' Claire said, and sneezed.”

“Principal Totty was one of those people who frown while they’re speaking, and then smile at the end of each sentence. It was weird. It was like there were two different people inside her brain.”

“You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.”

“I don't have a poetry section in the bookshop.(Don't have but should have, I have begun to think. The poetry, like everything else, is scattered thematically in a generally successful attempt to encourage punters to walk the circle, reading shelves which, if more conventionally arranged, they might feel happy to skip. But poetry - unlike fiction, biography, drama, history - continues to be generically in demand. It's not a question, as I used to assume, of no one reading poetry; more a matter of people who read poetry liking little else. They need a Section.)”