The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. Yes. It's sort of what we have instead of God.
There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse...
The road of the pass was hard and smooth and not yet dusty in the early morning.
I don't know. I only think the Austrians will not stop when they have won a victory. It is in defeat that we become Christian.The Austrians are Christians-- except for the Bosnians.I don't mean techni...
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.
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.
Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
I’d be glad to shoot you.’ ‘Would you?’ ‘No. There’s a law against it.
It's funny,' I said. 'It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love.''Do you think so?' her eyes looked flat again.'I don't mean fun in that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling.''No,'...
Blood is thicker than water,The young man saidAs he knifed his friendFor a drooling old bitchAnd a house full of lies.
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it...
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
There isnt always an explanation for everything.