One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

One must love everything.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Soup is cuisines kindest course

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.