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.
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.
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.
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.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.
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.
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.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
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 modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
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.
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.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
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.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
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.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
