“You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

“They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.”

“You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.”

“Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE”

“And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice.... ”

“Suppose you're teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You'll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.”

“And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.”