This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that… — Ernest Hemingway

'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.

'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'

'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.'

'Yes.'

'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.