Catholics From The United States

"Personal columnists ... are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him."

"Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about."

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after."

"When a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it."

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

"It is always a mistake to know an author."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

"Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times."

"There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

"There is no remedy for anything in life. Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes."

"The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own."

"But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones."

"Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ."

"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

"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."

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."

"Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic."

"About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

"That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you."

"'Darling, would you like to grow a beard?' 'Would you like me to?' 'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.' 'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.'"

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."

"Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose."

"You're my religion. You're all I've got."

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."

"All thinking men are atheists."

"In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."

"We’ll wait and see. Come on back in the shade, he said. You mustn’t feel that way. I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things. I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—— Nor that isn’t good for me, she said. I know. Could we have another beer? All right. But you’ve got to realize—— I realize, the girl said. Can’t we maybe stop talking? They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. You’ve got to realize, he said, that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you. Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along. Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple. Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple. It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it. Would you do something for me now? I’d do anything for you. Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

"The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders."

"Four times he swung with the bull, lifting the cape so it billowed full, and each time bringing the bull around to charge again. Then, at the end of the fifth swing, he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer’s skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt, to step clear, leaving the bull facing Zurito on the white horse, come up and planted firm, the horse facing the bull, its ears forward, its lips nervous, Zurito, his hat over his eyes, leaning forward, the long pole sticking out before and behind in a sharp angle under his right arm, held half-way down, the triangular iron point facing the bull."

"'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, 'we could have had such a damned good time together.' Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. 'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

"'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.' 'Yes.' 'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'"

"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés."

"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."

"All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."

"A bottle of wine was good company."

"I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have."

"'Listen Jake... don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?'"

"Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.' 'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands. 'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said."

"It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank."

"Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered."

"The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said."