“I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.”

“The time will soon come when a man may breakfast in New York, and lunch in San Francisco.”

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”

“Gotta kill these pains
Or blow out my brains
To free me from these chains
I'm trapped in this physical hell
To walk again I just might sell my soul
And I'm only twenty somethin' years old”

“If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years.”

“It really is the year 2007. Which means I must be…

Oh my God. I'm twenty-eight.

I'm old.”

“But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco. Decorators. They got to do something. But we don't have to glorify it. You know one of the reasons fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddamned designers hate women. Designers taking it out on the women. Now they're trying to get some more sexy things coming on again.”

“You are a concert pianist. That was my life when I was twenty-two years old.”

“I have a twenty-month-old baby [girl], [and] a sixteen-year-old boy— same maturity level.”

“Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.”