I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

But nothing seems to do any good.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.