Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.

She watched the glass, a plain woman, changing all to the delightful illusion of beauty. There was still time: for her ugliness was destined to bloom late, hidden first by the unformed gawkiness of youth, budding to plainness in young womanhood and now flowering to slow maturity in her early forties, it still awaited the subtle garishness which only decay could bring to fruition: a garishness which, when arrived at, would preclude all efforts at the mirror game.

I was proud of the way K.T. stepped up. Our plan was to establish the inside game with Baldwin and we were to reverse the ball and get it inside to Jeremiah, too. Jeremiah was a monster on the boards.

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.

As the flow of subliterary "news items" and anecdotes increases, the writer's work withers and stales until, in grim transference, his life becomes his oeuvre and he his only character.