Sunrise
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
The first draft of anything is shit.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
If a writer 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.
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
There isn’t always an explanation for everything.
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.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
So far, 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.
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"
"Yes, every once in a while."
"Do you know that in about thirty- five more years we'll be dead?"
"What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell."
"I'm serious."
"It's one thing I don't worry about," I said.
"You ought to."
"I've had plenty to worry about one time or other. I'm through worrying."
"Well, I want to go to South America."
"Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that."
"But you've never been to South America."
"South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same.”
-Ernest Hemingway