Quotes

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

A well begun is half ended.

All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

When I first wrote 'Papa Hemingway,' there were too many people still alive, and the lawyers for Random House didn't want to OK it. But now all that's been filtered away by the passage of all these people. And having the fortune of surviving, I now feel that I am the custodian of what Ernest wanted the world to know about him and these women.

We think of stars as celestial beings. And once in a while, they smile at us from the pages of 'People' magazine.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.