Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.

Man is not made for defeat.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.