"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."

"The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it."

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."

"Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters."

"Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love."

"Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you."

"This is a good place," he said."There's a lot of liquor," I agreed."

"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."

"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."

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better."

"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be."

"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."

"What you don't write is often more important than what you do."

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. 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."

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

"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."

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

"The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain."

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

"Time is the least thing we have of."

"In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone."

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

"Here's the beautiful lady with the beer."

"He did not want them themselves really. They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

"But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead. He put his two hands together and felt the palms. They were not dead and he could bring the pain of life by simply opening and closing them. He leaned his back against the stern and knew he was not dead. His shoulders told him."

"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."

"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."

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

"Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

"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."

"Besides, I'm not jealous. I'm just so in love with you that there isn't anything else."

"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."

"At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"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."

"Why must man not marry?" "He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose."

"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."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

"The writer must write what he has to say not speak it."

"For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive."

"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, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it."

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."