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You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
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Life is the best left hooker I ever saw, although some say it was Charlie White of Chicago
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Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I'll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.
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I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
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Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
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You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
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I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.
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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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No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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I am always in love.
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The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.