It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.