The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

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.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

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.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

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

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Courage is grace under pressure.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

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

Never mistake motion for action.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

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.

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.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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

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.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

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.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

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.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.