I’ve been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
The only decent bone in her body was mine.
Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.
Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.
Time is the least thing we have.
I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.
I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.
She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.
To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.
Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.
The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.
It’s a town you come to for a short time.
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because that gives you perspective.
I never knew of a Morning in Africa when I woke up and was not happy.
I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.
In war, one cannot say what one feels.
There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.