You bitch,' he said. 'You rich bitch. That's poetry. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.
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...
Please understand and love me.
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 m...
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance.
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.
He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obseessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.Now he would never w...
All the passengers were crowded over on the landside of the ship, watching through the narrow windows the careened hulk of a freighter, visibly damaged by shellfire, which had driven ashore to beach h...
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you w...
We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
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.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.
You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.
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 gi...