Every failure was a rival’s sabotage, every cruelty was someone else’s provocation, every debt was the market’s fault, every bruise was Charlotte’s lie or my own clumsiness or the stress of the deal.

He lived inside a story with no author but the world, a story in which things merely happened to him, and in which he was therefore never responsible for any of them.

And a man who is never responsible is a man who never has to change, and a man who never has to change will, given enough power and enough time, do worse and worse things, because nothing in his experience has ever taught him that the doing costs anything.

The belt was just the place the arithmetic had finally arrived.