This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.