I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.

It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.