The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.””Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?””Yes. I want to ruin you.””Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.
I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there’s a lot of difference.
When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.
Never fall in love?””Always,” said the count. “I am always in love.
I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you and I love you.
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.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.
This is a good place,” he said.”There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.
You are going to die like a dog for no good reason
wonder what day god created the egg’ ‘how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks’. ‘eat a egg
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
He can’t have gone, he said “Christ know he can’t have gone. He’s making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and her remembers something of it.” The he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.
The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.
But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.
Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
Do you suffer when you write? I don’t at all. Suffer like a bastard when don’t write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
I write description in longhand because that’s hardest for me and you’re closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
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.
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.
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.
You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing…. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know
Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.
I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.
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.
It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.
The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
Are you a communist?””No I am an anti-fascist””For a long time?””Since I have understood fascism.
World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.
In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone.
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore.
I had an inheritance from my father,It was the moon and the sun.And though I roam all over the world,The spending of it’s never done.
I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful.
The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.
I thought you’d be interested in these things as a government man. Ain’t you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain’t that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
The Lord is my shepherdI shall not want him for longHe maketh me to lie down in green pasturesand there are no green pasturesHe leadeth me beside still watersand still waters run deep
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon.
I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can’t expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
If my Valentine you won’t be,I’ll hang myself on your Christmas tree.
I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.
It must be most dangerous then to be a man. It is indeed, madame, and but few survive it
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
You’re beautiful. You walk wonderfully and if I were here and saw you now for the first time I’d be in love with you. If I saw you for the first time everything would turn over inside of me and I’d ache right through my chest.
Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
My heart’s broken,’ he thought. ‘If I feel this way my heart must be broken.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. It’s sort of what we have instead of God.
You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.””Sure,” I said. “I’d believe anything. Including nightmares.” “What’s the matter? Feel low?””Low as hell.
I still need some more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
You’re going to have things to repent, boy,’ Mr. John had told Nick. ‘That’s one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.
He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.Come let us fart in the home.There is no art in a fart.Still a fart may not be artless.Let us fart and artless fart in the home.
Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.
What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
Then he was sorry for the great fish… How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
The more I’m let alone and not worried the better I can function.
If you had stars inside your brain cells, you’d probably understand what I am talking about.
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
He felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers.
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don’t think I can handle it alone.
I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish,” he said. “Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.
Until you’re grown-up they send you to reform school. After you’re grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. … Harry didn’t say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again.
Blood is thicker than water,”The young man saidAs he knifed his friendFor a drooling old bitchAnd a house full of lies.
Named Harris,” Bill said. “Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.””Fortunate fellow,” Mike said. “What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
In order to write about life first you must live it.
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
I wonder. Of course maybe that isn’t what they figure to do. Maybe they aren’t going to do any such thing. But it’s natural that’s what they would do and I heard that word.
The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.
I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man… Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
One cat just leads to another.”[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
A writer’s style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.
Hem,’ he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.
Don’t let yourself slip and get any perfect characters… keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols.
Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.
Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.
What you don’t write is often more important than what you do
Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
No. Have it here where it is quiet.” “You and your quiet”, said Brett. “What is it men feel about quiet?” “We like it,” said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear.
Besides, I’m not jealous. I’m just so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.
It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain. I’m not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.’ She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.
The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was a bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
…Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain.
Cowardice … is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
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.
Cowardice as distinguished from panic is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
As long as you can start you are all right. The juice will come.
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
Cowardice as distinguished from panic is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last in it and not be smashed by it.
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.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes but it is sort of necessary.
Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out. If there’s nothing or very little the shock can kill a man.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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 movable feast.
The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
His (the writer’s) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
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.
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.
The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
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.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.
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.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
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.
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
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.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
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.
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.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.