The plain animal comfort of being in a place where you are not alone, where other people’s lives press warmly against yours, where the rooms are occupied by love rather than by proof.

And feeling it, I understood at last what my penthouse had really been: not a reward but a symptom, not the summit of a life but the evidence of one gone wrong, a series of beautiful empty rooms that had been quietly telling me the truth about myself for years, if only I had retained the ability to hear it.

A man can live a long time in a vacancy and call it an achievement.

It is one of the easiest and most respectable ways there is to waste a life.