He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.
Good writing is good conversation, only more so.
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
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.
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
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.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat – no matter who killed the meat for him.
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
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.
You’re beautiful, like a May fly.
He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...
Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.