Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

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.

In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.