There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn’t really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born.
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.
At night, never go to bed without knowing what you’ll write tomorrow.
Experiencing differences is crucial to the human condition. Especially when that difference is over the head, blower powder.
Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.
French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!
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.
Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.
The only kind of writing is rewriting.
The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.