God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were.

The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.

A better idea than my own is to listen.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.