What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.

Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.

This is a good place," he said. "There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.