"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me"
"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"
"There's no one thing that is true. They're all true"
"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"
"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"
"For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive"
"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"
"Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth"
"Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it"
"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way"
"Man is not made for defeat"
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know"
"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"
"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination"
"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way"
"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes"
"I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after"
"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true"
"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"
"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other"
"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"
"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 friend as loyal as a book"
"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"
"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"
