One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.”

[narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers — because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer — still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying — only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

You don’t know what a trial it is to be — like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.