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.

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

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

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.