“There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.”

“When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked.”

“Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.”

“The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere.”

“It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.”

“The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy) If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don’t belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling? Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance.”

“Telling a story to go with the meal is de rigueur, cher, it makes the food more memorable, and both meal and story get better when you sip that ice-cold Dixie beer.”