A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Life breaks all of us but some of us get stronger in the broken places.

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.