The two old men met early each afternoon on the pleasant wide porch and waited for the postman. The porch faced the park, the water and the afternoon sun. There were glass jalousie windows which could be rolled shut when the winter wind came up across the Tampa Bay.

“The trouble with me, if you want to know, Mr. Winter doll, do find a match for me. Must I beg, for God’s sake? Thank you. I don’t really look like this. Christ, there I go. Stop it, Maggie. The trouble with me is that I’m not worldly. Find me another drink.

Brandauer had Tuna Fish for lunch every day of the nine years I knew him. Sometimes on rye toast, sometimes on white bread, sometimes with a Coke, sometimes with a small glass of milk. Not a full size

Constitutionally, temperamentally, against the grain of his better intentions, his background and even many of his actions, Wendell Spear, the film critic and historian, was avaricious.

I’d come expecting to detest Tao Thinh, I left detesting him, but for a strange moment in between, a moment that was of hours’, perhaps days’, duration, I experienced with him a kind of devilish sympathy that made for an intimacy closer, and, in its way, more disarming, even incantatory, than would have been possible had our natures harmonized.

An odd town, Venice has always drawn oddities to itself. Feel displaced, unwanted, unappreciated, come to Venice. Too contemptuous, indolent or poor to wash, shave 

Ah, Bixby, Mettro, Manishin and Marx. Sitting here in my high-ceilinged under-priced West End Avenue Co-op, waiting for my wife to come by and leave the keys for the last time, I am giving a party in my head.

It was the long bad time after the long good time. Stocks a puzzle, real estate stalled, the bond market iffy, Wall Street firms down to half their size. Two of his former associates under indictment:

Can you imagine how it might have turned out if Katherine Eudemie had forgotten her child in the coatroom of the Russian Rendezvous in March instead of a glorious, sunny June? Think of the women’s coats soggy with snow—the men’s trench coats soaked with wet —the little girl. Tulip, under a curse of endless sniffles. Impossible to think of raising a child in such an environment.

From Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, a paradisal coast bears the permanent exhaust of the automobile: shack towns, oil pumps, drive-ins, Tastee-Freeze bars, motels, service stations. At Ventura, the coast turns a comer which sends the Santa Ynez mountains east-west and lets the sun hang full on the beaches for its long day.