All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.

Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.