The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

'Safety', the wife of Pablo said. 'There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.'

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.