But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.