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."

He had been gambling and drinking and eating now and again at the buffet tables the casinos keep heaped with food day and night, but mostly hopping himself up with good old amphetamine, cooling himself down with meprobamate, then hooking down more alcohol, until now, after sixty hours, he was slipping into the symptoms of toxic schizophrenia.

If such people ask news of me,—be silent, or say that I am dead. Let me be dead to them as they are dead to me.

Edgar Allan Poe!—Poe!—the ruin of the dissolute—in the Bronx—the Bronx! The meaningless whirl, the unbridled flesh, the obliteration of home and hearth!—and, waiting in the last room, the Red Death.

The last voyage, the longest, the best.

There is only one thing that a brave and honest man—a gentleman—should be afraid of. And that is death. He should carry the fear of death forever in his heart—for that ends all his glory, and he should use it as a spur to ride his life across the barriers.

It was, he thought, the strong good medicine of death.

I hate people who say they have no fear of death. They are liars, and fools, and hypocrites.

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

What will remain of a civilization that reverences a man above all the poets because he can make a cheap automobile at$500 each?