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| In order to write about life, first you must live it! | | Life | |
| It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. | | Uncategorized | |
| It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings. | | Uncategorized | |
| It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way. | | Uncategorized | |
| Live life to the fullest. | | Life | |
| Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. | | Uncategorized | |
| Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times. | | Uncategorized | |
| My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. | | Writing | |
| My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. | | Uncategorized | |
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| Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. | | Travel | |
| Never mistake motion for action. | | Action | |
| Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. | | Uncategorized | |
| Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective | | Uncategorized | |
| No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. | | Uncategorized | |
| Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about. | | Uncategorized | |
| Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
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| Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, 'What will you have, sir?' And I said, 'A glass of hemlock.' | | Marriage | |
