The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

Seldom have I eyed a half-finished book with more vivid dread.

droll, delicate, precise and alerting.

Apart from quick marriages, quick food, pornography, prostitutes and pawnshops, the sand-locked town has nothing to offer but hazardry. There are no clocks, no windows; there is no outer reality.

when a novelist writes about the future he is really writing about the recent past (the past being all there is to write about – the present is never around for long enough).

‘Drop that pistol,’ he tells Humbert: ‘Soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.’

‘the players are a ragtag group, sweaty, gloomy, badly dressed, gulping down fast food, defeated in some fundamental way’.

For better or for worse (and there are always some startling extremities on offer here), everyone must join the dance.

squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes.

you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.