No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.