The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.