Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave 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.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
