To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

Imagination is the voice of the daring.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, naïve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.