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

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.

One girl can be pretty - but a dozen are only a chorus.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of-“ I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money-that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.