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.

• Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
• Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
• 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.
• 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.
• The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
• My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
• 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.
• 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.
• It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that 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.