You will find yourself among people. There is no help for this nor should you want it otherwise. The passages where no one waits are dark and hard to navigate. The wet walls touch your shoulders on each side. When the trees were there I cared that they were there. And now they are gone, does it matter? The passages where no one waits go on and give no promise of an end. You will find yourself among people, Faces, clothing, teeth and hair and words, and many words When there was life, I said that life was wrong. What do I say now? You understand?

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.