Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.