Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
So far, 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.
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...
But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.
In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues...
Do you want to keep your knee, young man?''No', I said.'What?''I want it cut off,' I said, 'so I can wear a hook on it.
The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. 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, he t...
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last in it and not be smashed by it.
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...
I'm going to stay with you. If you go to jail, we might as well both go.
For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her.
Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world, and I loved him like you love God.
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together....
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling w...
Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
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 writ...