Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
Only when the clock stops does time come to life
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
Try to be better than yourself.
No man can write who is not first a humanitarian
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...
The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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