“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”

“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.”

“When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.”

“Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine.”

“If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.”

“We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.”

“It was the tyrannical, slightly stupid thing you say after you've made love.”