We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Nothing could have survived our life.

I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.

Youth doesn't need friends -- it only needs crowds.

It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

["The Sun Also Rises" is about] bullfighting, bullslinging and bullsh[*]t.