I was here on earth because I chose to be.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.