"No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can’t expect to find the people still there. The people are all gone. The party’s over…"
"They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one."
"There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually less future with truly ambitious women writers."
"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."
