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... she confessed to me that she was a terrible cook, which was why she had delegated the responsibility of preparing the dinner to her daughters. But, she added (and here she drew close to me and whispered in my ear), those three girls were none too swift in the kitchen either. After all, she said, she had taught them everything they knew, and if the teacher was an absentminded clod, what could you expect of the disciples?

He worked when the spirit moved him (most often late at night), and the rest of the time he roamed free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century flâneur, following his nose wherever it happened to take him. He walked, he went to museums and art galleries, he saw movies in the middle of the day, he read books on park benches. He wasn't beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence he never felt as if he were wasting his time. That doesn't mean he wasn't productive, but the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there. This helped him as a writer, I think, since his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn't on the job.

A good marriage can withstand any amount of external pressure, a bad marriage cracks apart.

'I'm taking this out of the mouth of William Tecumseh Sherman,' he said. 'I hope the general doesn't mind, but he got there before I did and I can't think of a better way to express it.' Then, turning in my direction, Sachs lifted his glass and said: 'Grant stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.'