My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat

My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

Wine is a civilizing agent.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.