There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

I have never wished there was a God to call on- I have often wished there was a God to thank.

I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

All things come to him who mates.