Quote collection
798 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it."
"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."
"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."
"Religion is the opium of the poor."
"Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use."
"No one you love is ever truly lost."
"The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it."
"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
"The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire."
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
"You must be prepared to work always without applause."
"The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green."
"The first draft of anything is sh*t."
"You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers."
"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
"An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead."
"Write drunk; edit sober."
"That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a wonderful discovery."
"Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong."