Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because that gives you perspective.
I never knew of a Morning in Africa when I woke up and was not happy.
I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.
In war, one cannot say what one feels.
There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, “Impossible,” when orders came?
Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.
The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.
Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
When you have a child, the world has a hostage.
America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.
The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.