“I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. "Lonely place," Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, "Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private. That's why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain't private." That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don't have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you gave up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you're just screwed. ”

“No wonder I want to be Robert Mitchum: big, strong, super-cool, with those Freon eyes of his. That's who I was pretending to be a minute ago - Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. - Ben”

“There are people, moreover, for whom even the absence of God is absent, who are shaken not by the privation of providence but by the privation of the privation, who live in a completely ungoverned and unconsoling world. To use the terms of another religious existentialist of Judaism against him: there is a man who is lonelier than the lonely man of faith, and he is the lonely man of no faith.”

“There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.”

“As I leave my building, Robert wolf-whistles at me, long and drawn out. Probably inappropriate of my doorman, but I appreciate the compliment. "I don't know where you're going," Robert says, "but you're going to knock them dead.""Thanks," I say, and decide it's better to keep to myself that I am headed to the constant-care floor of the Riverdale Retirement Home. The one place where that's a real possibility.”

“I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.”