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.
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.
Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
What I learned constructive about women is that no matter how old they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
We wait always for something that does not come.
The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.
There are worse places to be than on your own.