You're beautiful, like a May fly.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
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.
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
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.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
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.
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.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
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.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
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.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.