Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.
You're beautiful. You walk wonderfully and if I were here and saw you now for the first time I'd be in love with you. If I saw you for the first time everything would turn over inside of me and I'd ache right through my chest.
You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.
The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.
To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.
I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.
Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
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.
I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.
Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.
Summer is a discouraging time to work -- you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.
The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.
The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.
I don't. I don't want anybody else to touch you. I'm silly. I get furious if they touch you.
I'm not brave any more darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me.
When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.
They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.
But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
You're my religion. You're all I've got.
My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.
When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.
Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.
You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.
Fish, he said, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.
Do you have other things like that to look forward to?
Just everyday. I look forward to everyday.
God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her.
A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.
Being against evil doesn't make you good.
How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, What will you have, sir? And I said, A glass of hemlock.
If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.
Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.
You are all a lost generation. with credit to Gertrude Stein.
I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
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.
There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood.
After the New Yorker piece I decided that I would never give another interview to anyone on any subject and that I would keep away from all places where I would be likely to be interviewed. If you say nothing it is difficult for someone to get it wrong.
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.
No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.
You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.
I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
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.
Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.
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.
Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do.
I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.
Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your nerves.
A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
Con not, that thou be not conned.
I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.
Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
One cat just leads to another.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.
He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.
Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.
And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.
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.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
It is not bad, Santiago said. And pain does not matter to a man.
I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I've lost 30 pounds.
Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.
A bottle of wine was good company.
I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.