I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children's ...homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it fo...rced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was ...wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D'Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He hadn't known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from ...the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in hi...s weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working p...hilosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents o...f an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal t...erms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »