Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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.
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.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
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.
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.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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.
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.
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.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
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.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.