But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.