"Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture."

"The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematica…"

"Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped hi…"

"[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, b…"

"[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits …"

"When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plant…"

"The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tast…"

"I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, i…"

"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learne…"

"“Are you mocking the concept?” “Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”"