Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.
we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new things
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.
The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
Experiencing differences is crucial to the human condition. Especially when that difference is over the head, blower powder.
Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.
The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.
A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.
We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.
A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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.
The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.
You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.