-
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 you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
-
I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
-
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
-
You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
-
You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
-
No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
-
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
-
I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.
-
You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
-
I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
-
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.
-
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
-
I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.
-
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
-
You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.
-
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.
-
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.
-
What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
-
I am always in love.
-
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
-
Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.
-
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
-
You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.
-
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.