The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.