“With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.”

“But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.”

“On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.”

“Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.”

“Why is it that married people always say "Come in" when everything they do says "Get out"? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.”

“With sociology one can do anything and call it work.”

“This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.”

“Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.”

“Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?”

“Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.”

“This education we're giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that's what makes it so painful. We're showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.”