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

The smile suggested that this defeat, like all the others, was yet another feint or shimmy in a vast and inscrutable battle-plan which only Ron knew about. I need hardly add that the whole veneer has subsequently deteriorated and is barely visible behind the hot mists of paranoia which Greenwood now candidly exudes. Poor guy!

The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate;

Josh’s chess tutor, Bruce Pandolfini, is Manager of the Manhattan Chess Club, which sounds quite grand until you glimpse him scrubbing its toilet.

(‘a miserable mediocrity’).

and what else is a wife-beater but a man who runs out of words – who keeps coming up empty on the words?

tear-strengthened color of her green eyes

the most dramatic and least sophisticated.

the shrill clarity of the outdoors

their sharply individualized energies seem to operate outside the established social arrangement.