I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.