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Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.
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I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.
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Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
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Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.
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I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.
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The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
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That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
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It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.
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There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
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No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
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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 much after.
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Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
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If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
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A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
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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.
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
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It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.
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To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.
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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.
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I had gone to no such place but 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 all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.
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You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
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The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
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I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.