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.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Drinking is a way of ending the day.

I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I've lost 30 pounds.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.