The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

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.

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

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.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.