Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)