“Man is not made for defeat.”
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”
“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”
“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”
“What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”
“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
“Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”
“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”
“A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”
“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.”
“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”
“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.”
“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”
“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.”
“Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him.”
“I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”
“It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”
“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.”