All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
Man is not made for defeat.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
I rewrote the ending of ‘Farewell to Arms’ 39 times before I was satisfied.
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.
He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.
And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.
When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.