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You must be prepared to work always without applause.
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Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
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It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
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Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
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A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
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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.
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Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.
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French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.
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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.
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No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.
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Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.
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There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.
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We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.
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Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.
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I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.
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I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.
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There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.
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Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
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You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
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Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?
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If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.
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But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
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If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.
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An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.