Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires