Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
Now is the age of anxiety.
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
