Miss Turner got out a card and savagely wrote a note on it, her eyes snapping as she handed it over to Mildred. “All right, you wanted to know why that lady offered you a job as waitress, and why I recommended you for this. It’s because you’ve let half your life slip by without learning anything but sleeping, cooking, and setting the table, and that’s all you’re good for. So get over there. It’s what you’ve got to do, so you may as well start doing it.

She has something in her that I thought I had, and now I find I haven’t. Pride, or whatever it is. Nothing on earth could make Veda do what I’m going to do.

The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. ‘Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty.

Just you and me and the road. Just a couple of tramps, just a couple of gypsies, that’s it, but we’ll be together.

If your writing doesn’t keep you up at night, it won’t keep anyone else up either”.

Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.

As I say, they don’t teach it at the academy, but you learn it on the job: not every man’s death is a crime.

Mildred sat quite still, and when she heard Veda drive off she was consumed by a fury so cold that it almost seemed as though she felt nothing at all. It didn’t occur to her that she was acting less like a mother than like a lover who had unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness, and avenged it.

Suppose you did get a job as a saleswoman? What would you get for it? No matter how they figure it up, when you’re selling goods you get paid on commission, because it stands to reason if you weren’t making commission they wouldn’t pay you. But who’s buying any goods? You’d have just stood around some store, all day long, waiting for the chance to make a living, and not making it. People eat, though, even now. You’ll have something coming in.

A lot of novelists start late – Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.