There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.

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