‘The eastern side of every minute of mine is already colored by the light of our impending meeting. All the rest is dark, boring, you-less.’

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).

in his final death-driven surge towards ‘the big picture’.

In short, the universe – the world, human life – is a preposterous fluke.

Chapter by chapter, Village goes over to Bill’s people, to see if they have a problem with this or are uncomfortable with that, and Bill’s people bounce it back to Hill’s people with what they are unhappy about, and so it goes on, until in broad daylight and full consciousness you confront printed sentences which read: A University of Chicago study

a thickening mist of drugs and boredom.

At first it seems that Buford is taking us nowhere we haven’t already been. But when were we last there? Aren’t we insulated by irony, weariness and disgust? Haven’t we all spent years looking the other way?

America’s elaborately doctored well-being.

The author took a decade to recover from the first part of Don Quixote before completing and publishing the second. The modern reader, of course, enjoys no such holiday,