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

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.