Your blood coagulates beautifully.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

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

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

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.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.