“He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family.”

“Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.”

“You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

“In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change. ”

“Son, there are times a man has to do things he doesn't like to, in order to protect his family.”