So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.

That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game