Get over yourself, Anse—and quit jabbering about your new teeth.

A preposition wrapped in an adverb wrapped in an enigma, on is a tiny word, yet it contains multitudes.

After a time, Mr. Vollman said, If that man is the President, I believe I would prefer to stay on here. To remain within my sick-box, apart from the other place. The Reverend and myself, I am saddened to report, were obliged to agree.

At one point he told me it was, like, a crime thriller? But then at another point, it sounded like he was writing a comedy, but with sports in it. And then he said it was an “elegiac meditation on life,” but when he said it, I’m pretty sure he mispronounced “elegiac.”

Hume was sued after putting George Plimpton in a chokehold, convinced that one of the dilettante’s witticisms was cribbed from a Martial epigram. Hume wouldn’t release him until two Commentary editors and William Styron assured him that the bon mot was most definitely a Plimpton original.

As a public service, I’m supplying the general public with the following fair-use similes. Sprinkle them throughout your own writing and be amazed by the lift in the overall quality of your work.

What if Lotto and Mathilde were both to tweet?

Millions of Cats has the distinction of being this country’s longest-running in-print children’s book -- and it also has the distinction of being the most hellish murderscape to ever plague the minds of America’s youth.

The man’s daughter believes the hat could sink the campaign. She does not understand irony. And so she is shocked when hip kids one borough over begin requesting the hat.