“Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.”

“Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.”

“If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.”

“I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.”

“Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?”

“You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.”

“He had a face roughly the shape and color of a clumsily peeled Idaho potato, and he had a jaw like the end of a cigarette carton. ”