Quotes from Steven Martin

But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry.

Is it possible that a person's childhood fascination with some object could subtly influence every other decision made during his or her life, a snowballing of interests, propelled by obsession and compulsion, that rolls on long after the initial discovery is forgotten?

If necessity is the mother of invention, drug use is surely its can-do father.

Mentally, opium was a welling euphoria followed by a serene sense of well-being. The effects of the chandu were gradual and subtle, washing over me like a succession of tender caresses. A juvenile lust for kicks would not likely be satisfied by chandu's leisurely and deliciously nuanced mental banquet. This perhaps explains why, in China's past, high-quality opium was considered an intellectual pursuit and not recommended for young people or the mentally immature.

pipe dream." This term meant the same then as it does today, a way of describing an irrational sense of optimism. Irrational or not, this is opium's greatest gift to the smoker: boundless optimism—the kind that one rarely experiences beyond childhood. All good things seem possible; problems are easily solvable; obstacles are always surmountable.

There is nothing like a sanitized present to make one yearn for the wicked past.

Opium arrived in China around the seventh century via Arab traders, whose opium-laden camels traveled east over the fabled Silk Road. The Arabic connection is most evident in the Chinese word for opium, yapian, which is probably a corruption of the Arabic word for opium, afiyun. The Arabic word was, in turn, based on Afyon, the name of a province in what is now modern-day Turkey, where the Arabs believed opium originated.

Willi and I might take turns reading aloud passages from some of our favorite books (David Kidd's Peking Story and John Blofeld's City of Lingering Splendour were always at hand), and at least once during each session Willi's wife would come down to the Chamber to say hello and recline for a pipe or two.