Read, read, read. Read everything.
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
A man’s moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
You can’t. You just have to.
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
Poor man. Poor mankind.
I don’t think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don’t know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it – you can’t teach it.
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.
In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said, That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That’s why that’s sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it...