Quotes

As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

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 my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Never mistake motion for action

There is no hunting like the hunting of men, especially armed men, and those who have done this long enough to like it . . . they never care for anything else thereafter.

What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

[on Marlene Dietrich] If she had nothing but her voice, she could break your heart with it. But she also has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face.

When I dream of afterlife in heaven, the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

I drink to make other people interesting.

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.

How I admire your straight thinking, your head, your heart and your very lovely hands and I pray God always that he will make up to you the very great hurt that I have done you--who are the best and truest and loveliest person that I have ever known.

[on the Spanish Civil War] High in the sky and shining silver, death came to all who had no place to run, no place to hide.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

There are so many women with whom you can sleep, and so few women with whom you can talk.