"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-"

"Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ''What will you have, sir?'' And I said, ''A glass of hemlock.''"

"For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there."

"He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have"

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

"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 movable feast."

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge"

"They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him."

"The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it."

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

"I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently."

"To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them"

"Retirement is the ugliest word in the language."

"Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds."

"The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ''The very rich are different from you and me.'' And how someone had said to Julian, ''Yes, they have more money.''"

"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."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

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

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

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

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

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

"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."

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

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

"You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."

"The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him."

"Courage is grace under pressure."

"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."

"Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times."

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

"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 style of architecture."

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

"Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports ... all others are games."

"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering."

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."

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