if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

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

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.