Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.