"She saw flashes of genius in every passing remark, in the puns he was forever trying out (‘Muerto Rico’), and in his casual quips (‘If you want to be quoted, don’t quote’). She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, ‘in no way equal to Dostoevsky,’ as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism), and his weirder literary judgments (Nabokov’s writing was ‘too marinated’). She could forgive him his crudeness (the young women of Mount Holyoke were ‘mounties’; gay men tilted their chins in a way that was ‘Greek-asking’)."