He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody.

There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.