I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it’s the risk, the gamble. In any event it’s a thing I need.
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
A gentleman can live through anything.
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.
It is the writer’s privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
History is not was, it is.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...
Wonder. Go on and wonder.