You're awfully dark, brother," he said. "You don't know how dark.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

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

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.