There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Courage is grace under pressure.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

Never mistake motion for action.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

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.

Time is the least thing we have of.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

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.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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.

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.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

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.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.