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.
The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.
I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.
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.
Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.