“The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.”

“The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall”

“Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

“No season lives here. This space has quite successfully shut out any such interference. The cunning designer saw to it that there is not even a mirror in which the reader might contemplate his own appearance or anxiously search for the marks of age. The climate is grammatical. Nothing here but books, as if I were swaddled in them, as if the porous walls of books were by now almost a second skin. Or as if they provided a padding like the walls of madhouses, a cushion constructed of the language of the dead.”

“Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”