Nightwork

People who work at night all look as though they are being punished for some nameless sin.

To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck.

After an excellent dinner I wandered through the streets of Florence, stood awhile before the monumental copy of Michelangelo's statue of David in the Piazza della Signoria, musing on the nature of heroism and the defeat of villainy. Florence, with its history of plots and vendettas, its Guelphs and Ghibellines, was a fitting city in which to meet my enemy.

lingered on, in a cheap pensione, visiting churches, drinking a light white wine called Soave in bare cafés along the sides of the Piazza San Marco and watching Italians, an occupation that I found I enjoyed

The next day, feeling that perhaps I would never pass this way again, I took the rapido to Venice, a city that I believed, rightly as it turned out, would be even sadder at that season than Milan. The misty canals, the sad hooting of boat-homs, the black water and mossy pilings in the gray Adriatic winter light did much to restore the sense of my own dignity and erase the memory of the athletic frivolity of St Moritz

ew York is a good city for a man who prefers to be alone. It is the easiest city in the world to enjoy solitude.

it's just as easy to love a rich girl as a poor one.'

Man does not live by caviar alone.'

Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence.

The ruling law was simple - accident. The throw of dice, the turning of a card.