The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

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

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.