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.
— Ernest Hemingway
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Courage is grace under pressure.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
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.
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
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.
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.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
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.
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.
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
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.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
Never mistake motion for action.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
Man is not made for defeat.
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.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
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.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
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.
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.
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
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.
