We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.

One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

Everybody has something wrong with them.

I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.