A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately, God willing, one day-that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

It was that hour of dusk when the streetlights and headlights come on but make little difference.

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared from our civilization, even in wartime, and competition has become more and more sophisticated and abstract, Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

It was the smile of a boy at his own birthday party, the lad who is both humbled and wondrously elated by the realization that he is in a room full of people who are happy, abnormally happy, one might say, to see him alive and in their presence.

Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution.

A guy at the bar, well-dressed, came up behind Cassius [Muhammad Ali] and touched him lightly at about the level of the sixth rib and went back to the bar and told his girl, "That's Cassius Clay. I just touched him, no kidding."

Idleness was a sin not against the self or against God but against Mammon and Pierce & Pierce.

Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously.

Ironically, rock and roll, or whatever you want to call what the hysterical disc jockeys play, is very much in vogue now among intellectuals in New York and Paris and London.