​So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work. — Russell Baker

At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.

Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not.