“The strongest should come first in comedy because once a character is really established as funny everything he does is funny.”

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

“The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea.”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny...”

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

“He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set this sea captain on paper”

“I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and however pretentious that remark sounds... it is an absolute fact-- so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.”

“First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormousquantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalitiesabout the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him thenthat these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.”