“These rumors of my bungling are greatly exaggerated.” Barack Obama

“So I ask, even though I know, oh—are you Danny Glover?” Morrissey, on set of Predator 2

“ Dear Penguin Classics, I never believed the stories you published until it happened to me. ” Steven Patrick Morrissey, Autobiography, opening line, Penguin Classics, 2013.

“To watch Philip Roth detumesce is to watch the lowering of the American flag to half-mast.” Philip Roth, The Detumescence of Philip Roth, opening line. Penguin Classics, 2013.

“Obama defends embattled administration; ‘but I gave you new Arrested Development!’” New York Times push notification to iOS subscribers, 12 June, 2013. The President added, “new Daft Punk, man! Does that count for nothing? You were all over that in your Gchats yesterday!"

“Now watch me lay down this sick beat.” Vladimir V. Nabokov, Random Access, Memory, Random House, 2013.

“Feminism: a movement founded in the early 21st Century to criticize Lena Dunham” Lena Dunham, drunken Tweet almost sent, then deleted, 29 October 2012 1:41 AM

“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” Mitt Romney, tucking his penis between his legs in front of a mirror

“DTF? I suppose I’m divesting total funding. Yes. Yes. I am surely DTF.” Ben Bernanke, responding to a user-submitted question during the first ever Ask The Fed livechat on YouTube, April 15 2012

“I am the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers.” Jonathan Franzen, in his tub, to his rubber ducky, April 1 2012.

“Republicans: Obama ‘Happy’ with Mass Effect 3 Ending” CNN headline on Republican attack ad, March 15, 2012. “DNC: Attack Ad ‘Crosses a Line,’” a subsequent headline read.

“This is an old song from the On A Friday days, it’s called ‘Sniffin yr Knickers.’” Thom Yorke, introducing an old song during a Radiohead concert, St. Louis, MO, 9 March 2012.

“(Rubber, glue)” Vladimir Nabokov, responding in customary style to Edmund Wilson’s accusation that Nabokov had engaged in “scurrilous and perfidious inanities frankly beneath your stature in the world of letters” in the course of their correspondence , undated, ca. 1964.

“But he had one night a vision of a far greater writer, a pulchritudinous fellow with a fine Russian visage and a stern pellucid spark in his eye. The man’s demeanor spoke of a genius subtler and more virile than our poor hero’s own, and indeed scarcely had this man begun to speak—decanting in shamanic incantations a stream of sentences deft in their construction and fine in their effects, all cascading cadences and trembling ululations and plump red allophones—before our hero realized, with a terrible sinking feeling in his considerable gut, that the talent which he guarded so preciously was in fact a vulgar and meager thing, unworthy of anyone. He saw himself then not as an emperor over the realm of letters but as the mere custodian of a shabby and unfrequented public park, where slow and wall-eyed children enclose their mouths around the spouts of drinking fountains and swingsets smack them in the brainpan as bored housewives look on and smoke and dream of the plumber’s thick thighs. Gazing out from his sad townlet onto the palaces and terraces of his rival’s sentences—their resounding architectures, their velvet backdrops, their unglimpsed secret gardens—our Edmund wept; he understood at once the smallness and futility of his life; all his longest held and most deeply felt dreams crumbled in an instant into rust and ashes.” Vladimir Nabokov, suggesting a passage to his friend and pen pal Edmund Wilson upon the latter’s announcement that he was writing an autobiography (subsequently abandoned), undated correspondence, ca. 1964. Nabokov added “na-na na-na boo boo (a charming phrase I picked up in the course of my research for Lolita which I believe has its place here)” as well as a three foot long pencil-sketched illustration of a ‘veiny and frankly terrifying phallus’ labeled 'VN’ and 'to scale.'