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.
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.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
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.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
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.
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.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first 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.
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.