“Amazing, then, how with that one remark, he made a mortifying situation thirteen times worse.”

“I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.”

“At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?”

“That's one of the remarkable things about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse.”

“He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarreled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman that looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he could never cure himself of loving her.”

“I don’t think of myself as being a celebrity, it’s too mortifying. I have a hard time watching myself on screen and it’s getting worse. I can’t tell whether my work is good or not.”