Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.

Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.