“People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."[Afterword]”

“Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.”

“It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.”

“The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.”

“For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.”

“Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.”

“It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me.”