We sat down together on a bench in the lobby and quietly surveyed the hectic comings and goings of the rich and famouse and beautiful. In rushed Tom Hanks (it was the year of Forrest Gump – a dreadful film in case you are tempted to see it), in rushed a glamorous starlet with her entourage, in rushed numerous others, all of them looking confident, filled with a sense of their own importance, on top of the world, as if each one of them in fact owned the world, and after a while Budd turned to me, the eighy-year-old Budd, who had been watching such people since he was a child, who had been at the top and been at the bottom, the wise old man who both stuttered and lisped turned to me and said: “They all think it’s never going to end.”
[Paul Auster, Here and now: letters 2008 – 2011
Vintage 2014, p. 237]