“But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.”

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”

“When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?”

“footnote:"With all due respect" is grown-up talk for "I think you're stupid.”

“Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

“If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.”