Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Take a quick dip, relax with a schnapps and a sandwich, stretch out, have a smoke, take a nap or just rest, and then sit around and chat until three. Then I hunt some more until sundown, bathe again, put on white tie and tails to keep up appearances, eat a huge dinner, smoke a cigar and sleep like a log until the sun comes up again to redden the eastern sky. This is living…. Could it be more perfect?

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.