Breakfast of champions

it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief—any belief

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Ideas on Earth were badges of

friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with

friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with

enemies, in order to express enmity.

Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.
“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.

Here would be a good tombstone for Wayne Hoobler when he died:

Trout asked him what it had felt like to work for an industry whose business was to destroy the countryside, and the old man said he was usually too tired to care.

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

thus got in touch with a firm called World

Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los

Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn’t even

have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of

salacious pictures.

Trout’s employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No

reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even

though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two

thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne.