A Commonplace Book

I went to a late movie after a while. It meant nothing. I hardly saw what went on. It was just noise and big faces.

"`I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.` What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"

"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

He smiled. "That is from the `Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.` Here's another one. `In the room women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you, sir?"

Yeah -- it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."

"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot very much."

"Did you say, 'nonetheless'?"

[He] can take a long, hard look at himself and see what is there. It's not a very common gift. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

At three AM. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

The bar was pretty empty. Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century-Fox, using double-arm gestures instead of money. They had a telephone on the table between them and every two or three minutes they would play the match game to see who called Zanuck with a hot idea. They were young, dark, eager and full of vitality. They put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation as I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs.

[E]ven if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it.