I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.