Thank God I'm an atheist.

I can't help feeling that there is no beauty without hope, struggle, and conquest.

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.

Thank God, I am still an atheist.

I am an atheist, thanks be to God.

The bar... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable-and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.

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