To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.