Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.
Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.
But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.
I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.
Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.
A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.
Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.
This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it
They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
We have very primitive emotions,” he said . “It's impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.
The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.
I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.