An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it....

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly...

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt. “Don’t be childish, darling.” “I hope to Christ I am. Don’t...

Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your...

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to...

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all...

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

You are going to die like a dog for no good reason

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?

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. 

if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write...

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it...

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of...

Hem,’ he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too...

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people...

She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful. ‘Hello,’ I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside...

Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

Hem, you know I don’t think that owner’s wife where you live likes me. She wouldn’t let me wait upstairs for you.”I’ll tell her,’ I said.’Don’t bother. I can always wait here. It’s very pleasant...

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a...

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in...

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Never confuse movement with action.

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.