There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

Books are the door of escape from the forest.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.