When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth” – she hesitated. Port laughed abruptly. – “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.

Chicago Film festival winner. In the Introduction to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979) Gore Vidal ranked his short stories "among the best ever written by an American" writing: the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. That's what I've achieved.

He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky set in what was known as French North Africa which he had visited in 1931. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s Tangier was his home for the next fifty-two years the remainder of his life. His aPaul Bowless are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.