Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.