"To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years."

"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."

"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."

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters."

"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."

"I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

"Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself."

"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."

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

"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."

"I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg."

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."

"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."

"That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you."

"You should not judge, you should understand."

"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."

"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."

"I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"He was mad and plenty brave."

"I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing."

"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."

"People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."

"All things truly wicked start from innocence."

"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."

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

"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."

"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski."

"When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first."

"All thinking men are atheists."

"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."

"You're beautiful, like a May fly."

"I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it."

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one 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. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

"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."

"Blood is thicker than water,"The young man saidAs he knifed his friendFor a drooling old bitchAnd a house full of lies."

"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."