You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.

---

I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.

---

We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.

---

Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.

---

If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too

---

So what’s the use of repentance, and what do you care for goodness, and what if you should die in a quake, so who the hell cares? So I walked downtown, so these were the high buildings, so let the earthquake come, let it bury me and my sins, so who the hell cares? No good to God or man, die one way or another, a quake or a hanging, it didn’t matter why or when or how.

---

I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

---

Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.

---

Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.

---

Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.

---