It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.

But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.

I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time.

They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.

Fiction is an improvement on life

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.