When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

War is not won by victory.

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

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.

Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.