It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.