“Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?”

“Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore.”

“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”

“Only poetry isn't shit.”

“Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.”

“Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.”

“Sometimes, after they'd done the shopping, they would stop, each with his or her cart, in front of a bookstore that carried the paperback edition of his book. His wife would point to it and say: you're still there. Invariably, he would nod and then they would continue browsing the mall stores. Did he know her or didn't he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real.”