"my mother, poor fish,wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!why don't you ever smile?"and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was thesaddest smile I ever saw"

“I've given you my time. It's all I've got to give - it's all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour."... "my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement... I've been the loser.”

“Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.”

“An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

“It's 4:30 in the morning, it's always 4:30 in the morning.”

“I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.”

“But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.”