It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

There isnt always an explanation for everything.

Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

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.

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

I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.