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But for anything to age gracefully, eternal vigilance is necessary, and Hollywood has not been carefully tended. It has been knocked down flights of stairs, abandoned, left for dead, and sold into slavery. Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is better....

He was happiest with a regular scheme of things. He tended to eat the same meals over and over and to wear the same clothes; to drop off his cleaning on a certain set day and to pay his all his bills on another. The teller who helped him on his first trip to ma bank was the teller he went to forever after... There was no room in his life for anyone as unpredictable as Muriel. Or as extreme.

The engines had a weary, dogged sound.It was the period he thought of as the long haul—the gulf between supper and breakfast when they were suspended over the ocean, waiting for that lightening of the sky that was supposed to be morning although, of course, it was nowhere like morning back home. Morning in other time zones was like something staged—a curtain painted with a rising sun, superimposed on the real dark.

'What interests me are stories about survivors,' said Erlendur. 'People who escape with their lives from dangerous situations in the Icelandic wilderness. How do they cope? Why do some live while others don't, though the circumstances are similar? Why do some get into trouble and others not? What mistakes do people make? How can you avoid them?'

To be a real success in public relations, you have to be half charlatan and half messiah. The same qualifications make a good teacher or a good Member of Parliament or U.S. Senator.

A woman, a baby strapped to her back, trotted along the bridge balancing three beams of lumber, at least ten feet long, on her head. The baby slept contentedly. At least it wasn't crying.

To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books....

he reason for the break was a mystery—he'd only said that a man can only get so fat before his woman searches for a thinner man. But what else could he have said? If someone asked why my marriage was crumbling, my answers would have been just as ludicrous. Such things cannot be paraphrased.

Stories begin this way, with the mundane details. Underwear, books, leaves. Because these are the irrefutable facts; they exist outside speculation I'm in that dacha now, verifying everything, because while other points in time may be chosen, this is where my confession truly begins.

Passed the turf club. Looked in. Just a bunch of old guys. With money. How did they do it? And how much do you need? And what did it all mean? We all died broke and most of us lived that way. It was a debilitating game. Just to get your shoes on in the morning was a victory.

Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else's power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can just assume that it is part of the natural order of things....

The idea of decline is a difficult one to use, however. Some Ottoman writers themselves used it. From the late 16th century onwards, those who compared what they saw around them to what they believed to have existed earlier often said that things were not what they had been in an earlier age of justice....

Al-Ghazali: There is no entry into the heart except through the antechamber of the ears. Musical tones, measured and pleasing, bring forth what is in the heart and make evident its beauties and defects .... whenever the soul of music and singing reaches the heart, then there stirs in the heart that which preponderates in it.

By the 10th century, men and women in the Near East and the Maghrib lived in a universe which was defined in terms of Islam. The world was divided into the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War, and places holy to Muslims or connected with their early history gave the Abode of Islam its disti9nctive feature. Time was marked by five daily prayers, the weekly sermon in the mosque, the annual fast in the month of Ramadan

The enthusiasm of his type for skewering the natives (and raping their women) was soon to reach such alarming proportions that even the Church felt cnstrained to act; in 1537, Pope Paul III decreed that the savage was capable of redemption. This gave him the status of a human being. Unfortunately, this news came too late for those visited by the early conquistadors.

In the cityroom they called it the dirty spoon: one of ten thousand narow tunnels furnished with a counter, a row of buttockpolished backless stools, a coffeeurn and a Greek proprietor resembling a retired wrestler....

All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man's spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before the triumph becomes dismay—the moral and spiritual I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster.

She was a very remarkable woman and her huband, the Raisulid Malik Eshraf, was so devoted to her that he mourned her death for a month before he married again.

Kleindorf took the cigar from his mouth, blew smoke at the ceiling, and tapped ash into an ashtra. Why he was so finicky I don't know; the whole damned room was like a used ashtray.

Understand that WRITTEN BY precedes the name of the man who sat long hours alone and concerned, to create a dream for an actor of Leonard Nimoy’s stature to work with. And remember the names of the writers who have done their work well. Honor them. And when the writers have been bad, then condemn them.

She gripped her pistol with two hands to steady her aim, took a deep breath, and fired a round at the roof. Counting her shots before she finished them, she sprang and somersaulted, still firing. Her left arm banged into the arched passage entrance and sharp pain shot through her back. She prayed her shoulder wouldn't go out on her now.

Hecht moved his cadaverous frame across the parquet floor. Something about him struck her as familiar. As he lifted his arm onto her desk, she saw faint blue numbers tattooed on his forearm peeking out from his jacket sleeve. Did he want her to find Nazi loot in numbered Swiss bank accounts?

In her room at the Hermitage, the window was half open, and I could hear the regular plunk of tennis balls and the players' distant cries. If there still existed some nice, reassuring idiots who wore white outfits and whacked balls over a net, then that meant the world was continuing to turn and we had a few hours' respite.

This is not the principal reason for the sanctity of Soron [Temple}. According to the Vishnu Purana, it was at Soron that Hiranyaksha, an obstreperous demon who had pulled the earth down to the bottom of the sea, was slain by Vishnu in his third incarnation as a wild boar, after a battle which lasted a thousand years.

A city that forgets murder victims is a city lost. This is where we don't forget. We're like the guys the bring in in the bottom of the ninth inning to win or lose the game. The closers. If we can't do it, nobody can.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinions any more.

My room didn't do much to cheer me up. I read in about half a dozen books, but I couldn't get interested in any of them, and I finally fished out a couple of old Playboys and went through them, looking at the shiny, naked girls. But whatever I did, that night, I just seemed to get more and more restless; it was like an itch there's no way to scratch.

Less than thirty seconds had elapsed since Guido fired at Maurer. And neither the shot nor what followed had made more noise than a man slapping an uncut book on a table and proceeding to cut a few pages.

While we were eating I kept glancing at her, at the silvery blaze of hair, the pale, almost transparent skin, the prominent, brittle wrist bones.