It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to keep quiet.

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

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.

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.

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'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Never confuse movement with action.

Write drunk; edit sober.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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

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

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Man is not made for defeat.

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

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.

It’s not finishing the bottle that gets you in trouble; it’s opening another one.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

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.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Time is the least thing we have of.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

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.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

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.

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

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

The first draft of anything is shit.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

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

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.

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.

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.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

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

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

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

Courage is grace under pressure.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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.

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.

Never mistake motion for action.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

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

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

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

When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen.