Memo from Paris

"I always try to write on the principal of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg... It is the part that doesn't show."

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened. "

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

"All things truly wicked start from innocence."

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

"Courage is grace under pressure."

"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."

"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true."

"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me. "

"If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work."

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"Never mistake motion for action."

"That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. "

"The shortest answer is doing the thing."

"You're beautiful, like a May fly."

-Ernest Hemingway