When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

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

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

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

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

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.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

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.

Never confuse movement with action.

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.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

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

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.

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.

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 war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

Never mistake motion for action.

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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

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

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

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

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

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Man is not made for defeat.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

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.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

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

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

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.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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

Courage is grace under pressure.

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

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

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.

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

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

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.