The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.

Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.