"It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready."

"Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you only keep me from being killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus' The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody."

"Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers."

"You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity."

"I don't know who made the laws, But I know there ain't no law that you got to go hungry."

"The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without."

"Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it. This may not be true but he had believed it to be true for a long time and this summer they had experienced happiness for a month now and, already, in the nights, he was lonely for it before it had ever gone away."

"Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do."

"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 everyone 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."

"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in."

"To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you."

"Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is, so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be."

"Only I have no luck any more. 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."

"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."

"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other."

"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too."

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

"There isnt always an explanation for everything."

"To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe."

"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."

"The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish."

"Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."

"Wars are caused by undefended wealth."

"I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it."

"In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die."

"People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars."

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it."

"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. It's sort of what we have instead of God."

"You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another."

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it."

"I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..."

"There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story., 1958)"

"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."

"I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful."

"Never confuse movement with action."

"I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down."

"I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers."

"The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not."

"I felt very lonely when they were all there."

"Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it."

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

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

"Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh."

"God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful..."

"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture."

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

"I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you."

"Let us sleep," he said and 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."