The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
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.
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.
On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
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.
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.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
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.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Never mistake motion for action.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.