Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.