The Infinite Library

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

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

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

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

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

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

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

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”

“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.”

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

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

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

“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.”

“I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.”

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

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

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

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”

“How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.”

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

“Never mistake motion for action.”

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. [...] Part of you died each year when leaves fell from the tress and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”

“Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; 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.”

“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”

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

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

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

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“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.”

“You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

“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 writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”

“I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.”

“After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.”

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