It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.
All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.
One battle doesn’t make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Having books published is very destructive to writing.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life – and one is as good as another.
There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.