Great Throughts Treasury

"They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much."

"Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down."

"But you drank your black coffee by choice, believing that Paris was sufficient alcohol."

"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."

"Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed."

"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."

"No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence."

"Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."

"The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere."

"Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be."

"They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much."

"There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ?pencil work? as John O?Hara calls it ? that is, minor changes in wording ? or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work."

"They were learning that New York had another life, too ? subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city ? a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more."