Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.
I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.
London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.
I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
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.