I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

A man does not exist until he is drunk.