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.
I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time...
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.