'SPIEGEL: How is your daughter handling the situation? Does she know where her mother is?

Verzilov: My daughter tells everyone that Putin has locked her mother in a cage and that we have to find a way to get her out. She draws diagrams showing how we can go about doing this with bulldozers and buses, first by tearing down the prison walls and then by breaking open the cage.'

On 'routines':

'Have as many cards or slips of paper as you have points or gags. Write only one point or gag on one card or slip of paper. On the first card write "Introduction," and always keep that card first in your hand. Then take up a card and read the point or gag on it as following the introduction, the second card as the second point or gag, and so on until you have arranged your monologue in an effective routine.'

Overbury's Characters

'There were people throwing pies at one another.'

'…to replace a realism based on characters and interiority with one based on systems.'

Wow, Thoreau really went ham on that Flint dude.

If you're gonna own a store, you might as well stock ice cream so you can eat it for free, otherwise what's the point of owning a store?

Maybe the most surprising thing about Robert Shields' diary (a page of which is here) is that it contains anything like impressions, anecdotes, or opinions at all.

'I don't leave town. I haven't left town since 1985, to visit my brother in Tennessee. I don't like to be away overnight, because it gets me behind. If I travel to Walla Walla to do shopping, it puts me behind in the diary. I have to take notes all the time, and I get back and it takes me a day to catch up with the notes. So I avoid going out. I avoid being away.'

'The lyrics are so filthy that I can-not enclose them in this letter.'

(And a concerned mother: 'Is there perhaps a subliminal type of perversion involved?'.)