Nothing Is Loathsomer Than The

History - An Account, Mostly False, Of Events, Mostly Unimportant

One Of The Things I Miss About Teaching Is That Students Would Tell Me What I Ought To Read. One Of My Students, Back In The 1960s, Put Me Onto Borges, And I Remember Another Mentioning Flann O'brien's At Swim Two-birds In The Same Way.

I Admire Writers Who Can Make Complicated Things Simple, But My Own Talent Has Been To Make Simple Things Complicated.

A Curious Thing About Written Literature: It Is About Four Thousand Years Old, But We Have No Way Of Knowing Whether Four Thousand Years Constitutes Senility Or The Maiden Blush Of Youth.

Nothing Is Intrinsically Valuable; The Value Of Everything Is Attributed To It, Assigned To It From Outside The Thing Itself, By People.