You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.