It is usually impossible for a large body of people to support themselves indefinitely by borrowing money, although a few people enjoy a great success at it for a time.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers.

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...

Don’t let yourself slip and get any perfect characters… keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols.

There isnt always an explanation for everything.

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.

I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion...

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he...

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at...

Besides, I’m not jealous. I’m just so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax...

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not...

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.

One cat just leads to another.”[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For...

The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows...

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship.

Courage is grace under pressure.

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...

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each...

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are...

He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize...

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our...

you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

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.

That’s my town,’ Joaquin said. ‘What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.’ Then, his face grave, ‘There they shot my father. My...

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned...

Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.

Until you’re grown-up they send you to reform school. After you’re grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Nie chciałeś wziąć ze mną ślubu w kościele i to złamało serce mojej biednej matce, o czym dobrze wiesz. Tak cię kochałam, że było mi obojętne, czyje serce łamię dla ciebie. Och, że też mogłam...

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living...

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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.

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.

Grace under pressure.

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

let us sleep,” he said and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making...

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.