Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Anyone can be a fisherman in May.
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.
When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.
All thinking men are atheists.
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
All bad writers are in love with the epic.
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.