You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.””Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?””Yes. I want to ruin you.””Good,” I said. “That’s what I want...

People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

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

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there...

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were,...

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and...

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few...

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own...

Even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.

It must be most dangerous then to be a man. It is indeed, madame, and but few survive it

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they...

Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.

A writer’s style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent...

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it...

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone.

Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.

He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together....

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

To show his nervousness was not shameful; only to admit it.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

The fish is my friend too…I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if...

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to...

But I could tell thee of other things, Inglés, and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a...

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does...

What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that...

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley...

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know...

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

Blood is thicker than water,”The young man saidAs he knifed his friendFor a drooling old bitchAnd a house full of lies.

My heart’s broken,’ he thought. ‘If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.

The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.

I write description in longhand because that’s hardest for me and you’re closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome...

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s...

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Don’t you believe I love you? Don’t know how I can make you believe. I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye–that was the trouble–I wanted to kiss you goodnight. […] Of course I love you....

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and...

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.