...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.

Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.

[Bachelors'] approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...

In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.