Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.