90% of the population is a fanatic […] Frank is a fanatic on keeping an open mind. […] Ahmed a doll. Fanaticism linked to abstinence. Abstinence from… - Mary McCarthy

Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter — "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" — page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually — but with an effect of suddenness — became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove.

Furness […] patently believed in nothing, not even in himself, nothing, that is, but the amusing warp-and-woof of events and persons.

St Mary of Egypt […] has, by the way, two qualifications for being a Venetian saint — first, she was a courtesan, and, second, when she died, her remains were buried by a pious lion.