It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Never mistake motion for action.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

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.

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?

Man is not made for defeat.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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 love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

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.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

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.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Time is the least thing we have of.

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.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

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 know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

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.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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.

Courage is grace under pressure.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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.