You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

In war, one cannot say what one feels.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

My big fish must be somewhere.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.