You have to write badly in order to write well.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene...
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.