I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.

I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

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

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

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

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.