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

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.

The first draft of anything is shit.

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a...

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed...

I had gone…to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was...

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But...

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

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.

He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly...

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.