Everything Quotes

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.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Time is the least thing we have of.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

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

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

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

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

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

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 game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Man is not made for defeat.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

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 when it was brushed or marred.

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

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.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Action is character.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

You can stroke people with words.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.