“They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”
“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.”
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
“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.”
“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
“Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”
“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”
“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 age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.”
“A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”
“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.”
“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”
“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.”
“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had 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.”
“I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”
“It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”
“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 might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”
“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 movable feast.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.”