"Man is not made for defeat."

"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."

"What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."

"That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way."

"To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years."

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

"The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture."

"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."

"All things truly wicked start from innocence."

"Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."

"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

"When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first."

"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true."

"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for."

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."

"Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?"

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

"I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it."

"There's no one thing that is true. They're all true."

"You're beautiful, like a May fly."

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

"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."

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."

"When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea."

"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred."

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

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

"The shortest answer is doing the thing."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me."

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

"The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

"If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work."

"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."

"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination."

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

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