"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."

"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."

"We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore."

"If my Valentine you won't be,I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree."

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love."

"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."

"Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job."

"Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it."

"The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last in it and not be smashed by it."

"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."

"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."

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."

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

"Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book."

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."

"She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things."

"The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought."

"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."

"You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."

"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."

"I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and Ilove thee more."

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."

"You know I'm no squealer, Harry.''You're a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.''I'm a good man,' he said. 'You oughtn't to talk to me like that.''They can't make it fast enough to keep you a good man,' I told him. But I didn't worry about him any more because who was going to believe him?"

"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true."

"Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out."

"Let me tell you something. You won't mind, will you? Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you can't have scenes without crying, and then you pity yourself so much you can't remember what the other person's said. You'll never be able to remember conversations that way. Just try and be calm. I know it's awfully hard. But remember, it's for literature. We all ought to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I'm going to England without a protest. All for literature."

"I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury 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."

"I don't want to fool with it but what choice have I got? They don't give you any choice now. I can let it go, but what will the next thing be? I didn't ask for any of this and if you've got to do it you've got to do it."

"You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his."

"I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as on seventy years, granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age."

"How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time."

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

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."

"He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have."

"In those days, there was no money to buy books."

"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."

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

"The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on."

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

"Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it."

"In order to write about life first you must live it."

"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."

"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."

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

"You lose it if you talk about it."

"If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about."