“Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.”

“Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.”

“In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness”

“This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

“A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.”

“I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers...”

“[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.”