At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what? |
Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. |
Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. |
Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday. |
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. |
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world. |
It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history |
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. |
Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell. |
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. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. |