When I travel, I always take my Winsor & Newton watercolor kit, which is the size of a pack of cigarettes when folded up. I bought my first one in the 1980s. It was handy to bring on trips, and I packed it into a leather pouch along with a couple of brushes, a pencil, an eraser and paper.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

In the movies, Bette Davis lights two cigarettes and hands the second one to James Cagney. It was just so glamorous and romantic.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

Probably millions of Americans got up this morning with a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a donut. No wonder they are sick and fouled up.

My mom started smoking when she was 11. She went to the hill next door to try her first cigarette. She set the entire hill on fire, but it didn't deter her.

My mother, Marnie Fahr Steyer, was a lifelong smoker - up to three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. I like to think that, if Mom were still with us today, she'd be happy with the strides we've made to protect our children from the ongoing health crisis of tobacco addiction.

I sit on my duff, smoke cigarettes and watch TV. I'm not exactly a poster girl for healthy living.

The shooting of the guns, that was kind of funny, because rolling a cigarette and shooting a gun aren't like normal things for a 13-year old girl!

No phone. No pool. No pets. No cigarettes. Ultimate freedom... No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become Lost in the Wild.

Far too many times over the next 12 to 15 years, it was brought to my attention that people who followed my exercise guidelines exactly but ignored their diet, their weight and their cigarette smoking had heart attacks at age 55.

Such lifestyle factors such as cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, little physical activity and low dietary calcium intake are risk factors for osteoporosis as well as for many other non-communicable diseases.

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

When kids run up to me and ask, 'What happened?' I just lean over and whisper, 'Cigarettes.' And once I was in a car and this girl at traffic lights was giving me the eye. She could only see my head, so I decided to do a 360 in the car seat to freak her out. Her face was like, 'Whoa, what is going on?' She sped off really quickly.

It's amazing to me that young people will still pick up a cigarette.

Marketeers have become so savvy at creating emotional associations with their products that they have us believing electric vehicles are "green," though in some ways they pollute differently than gas vehicles and in other ways the same. Electric vehicles are no more "green" than low-tar cigarettes are "healthy," but whether driving the one or smoking the other we've been given a reason to puff our chests.

In as much time as it takes to smoke a cigarette, a person's life was changed forever.

I think one can tell a lot about a person from the way he chooses to let the stub of his cigarette burn out...

I never held a cigarette behind my ear. It was always a pen. --The Writer

That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing "Come All Ye Faithful" like mad. Big deal. It's supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can't see anything religious or pretty, for God's sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would've puked if he could see it.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she had probably put herself in unnecessary danger.

Fuck you, angel. Fuck you and all God's little prison bitches. He slips you some cigarettes and a con job smile and you run off to do his dirty work for him. Go and scare some sinners. No one's listening to you here.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an? other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.