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Man is not made for defeat.
Ernest Hemingway
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
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.
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
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.
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
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 the other.
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Time is the least thing we have of.
After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
Courage is grace under pressure.
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
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.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Never mistake motion for action.
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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