I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.

The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.

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.