"Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind."

"He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood."

"Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs."

"True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories."

"American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them."

"I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home."

"Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it."

"People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error."

"In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order."

"Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it."

"The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners."

"Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in."