“They’s no use kiddin’ ourself any more,’ said Tommy Haley. ‘He might get down to thirty-seven in a pinch, but if he done below that a mouse could stop him. He’s a welter; that’s what he is and he knows it as well as I do. He’s growed like a weed in the last six mont’s. I told him, I says, “If you don’t quit growin’ they won’t be nobody for you to box, only Willard and them.” He says, “Well, I wouldn’t run away from Willard if I weighed twenty pounds more.”’‘He must hate himself,’ said Tommy’s brother.‘I never seen a good one that didn’t.”

“Are you lost, Daddy?" I asked tenderly. "Shut up," he explained.”

“Although he is a very poor fielder, he is a very poor hitter.”

“Some like them hot,some like them cold.Some like them when they're not to darn oldSome like them fat,some like them lean.Some like them only at sweet sixteen.Some like them dark,some like them light.Some like them in the park,late at night.Some like them fickle,some like them true,But the time I like them is when they're like you”

“Shut up,' he explained.”

“I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.”

“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.' That’s the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.”