“Damin, if you don't want people getting killed, you really should rethink this whole worshipping the God of War philosophy, you know. It's been my observation that people quite often come to harm when you throw them all on a field together, arm them with sharp implements, and tell them to hit each other until there's nobody left standing.”

“Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way.”

“You don't hit a child when you want him to stop hitting. You don't yell at a children to get them to stop yelling. Or spit at a child to indicate that he should not spit. Of course, you want children to know how to sympathize with others and to "know how it feels," but you ... have to show them how to act—not how not to act.”

“There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that...but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe.”

“This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.”

“What makes me say these things is that I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven't got anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It's a sickness. But they don't want you to care for them as they really are. No, that's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie darling, don't do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter to them.”