Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
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.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
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.
There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.
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.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
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