"So my father's life might be seen as a particularly lugubrious fairy tale. He was Sleeping Beauty, and in 1929 not one but several princes, including Bell Telephone, had begun to hack through the briers to wake him up. But then they all got sick for sixteen years. And while they were in the hospital a wicked witch turned Sleeping Beauty into Rip Van Winkle instead." Chapter 1, pg. 24

"And may I say parenthetically that my own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating. Intruders, no matter how ill-natured or stupid or dishonest, are as refreshing as the sudden breakthrough of sunbeams on a cloudy day.

"The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza." Chapter 3, pg. 47

"In both, I remember, I exclaimed over the foreshortening of American literary history, in which seeming generations of writers may be separated...