I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Try to be better than yourself.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.