I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

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.

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.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.