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

"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."

"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."

"What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done."

"Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is."

"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."

"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."

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

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."

"Courage is grace under pressure."

"If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it."

"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."

"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."

"Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting."

"To show his nervousness was not shameful, only to admit it."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"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."

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

"The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found."

"But in the Gulf you got time. And I'm figuring all the time. I've got to think right all the time. I can't make a mistake. Not a mistake. Not once. Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to do and something to think about besides wondering what the hell's going to happen. Besides wondering what's going to happen to the whole damn thing."

"I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish, he said. "Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish."

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

"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."

"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."

"The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function."

"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."

"There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life."

"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

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

"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."

"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken."

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

"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."

"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

"I'm 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. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

"Man is not made for defeat."

"The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grit and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, inter-breeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban boilto houses, shacks whose only romance was their names."

"Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols."

"Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important."

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

"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]"