No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.

Nothing any good isn't hard.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.