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| For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. | | Writing | |
| For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive. | | War | |
| 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 the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Cheating; Tragedy | |
| From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and al | | Uncategorized | |
| God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers. | | Criticism; Literature | |
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| He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have | | Luck | |
| Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment. | | Uncategorized | |
| Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Talent | |
| How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We are born lucky. Yes, we are born lucky. | | Trying | |
| I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- | | Criticism; Writing | |
| I do not think I had 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. | | Uncategorized | |
| I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight. | | Kissing | |
| I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true. | | Uncategorized | |
| I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. | | Morality | |
