Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
Easy writing makes hard reading.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
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.
My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.
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.
I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.
They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.