People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind."

"The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress."

"There follows a little obscenity here, a dask of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born."

"Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time."

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.