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

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

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

"Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what…"

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

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

"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…"

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