Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?
You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.
You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.
You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood.
Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.
A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.
And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.
In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.
Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.
Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.
But don’t try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.
In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
However you make your living is where your talent lies.
Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.