Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.

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.