Before a man's forty, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two, it's the story that hurts most. Anyway I'm not forty yet.

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

The gain to the winner is always less than the loss to the loser.

It's no good protecting people or even looking after them past a certain point. One can't grasp more than a piece of anyone. Most of the rest can only be protected by themselves and the remainder by hired specialists and doctors and dentists and professional protectors.

Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

As for sex, well, I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned. I mean, all history is love and violence.

I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn’t care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn’t care, because none of them would ever own him—own any larger piece of him than I now did.