Quotes About Experience

Los buenos libros se parecen en que son más ciertos que si hubiesen sucedido de verdad y en que, cuando terminas de leerlos, sientes que todo te sucedió y después, que todo te pertenece: lo bueno y lo malo, el éxtasis, el remordimiento y el dolor, la gente y los lugares y cómo estaba el tiempo.

A writer's job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make an absolute truth.6

That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed. We never went back to the Vorarlberg and neither did the rich.

You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money.

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.

It's this way, see--when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn't get any;then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer's any good, he doesn't get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.

Non sopporto il pensiero che la mia vita stia scorrendo via così in fretta e che io in realtà non la viva.

If you have plenty of money, want not to see but to have seen a bullfight and plan no matter whether you like it or not to leave after the first bull, buy a barrera seat so that someone who has never had enough money to sit in a barrera can make a quick rush from above and occupy your expensive seat as you go out taking your pre-conceived opinions with you.

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.

I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me.

For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obseessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it. Now he would never write the things he had saved to write, until he knew enough to write them well

Here's the reason why the peasant is wise. He's wise because he's beaten from the very start. Give him power and then you'll see how wise he is.

I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.

Imagination] is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.

I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.

Lie life through its fullest

For all of us who lived in Paris; we will never forget it because Paris is a moveable feast

Cdo gjë mund të kalohet në këtë botë të mallkuar. Ndrydhi të gjitha ndjenjat, vdis nga brenda dhe cdo gjë do të kaloj lehtë. Vdis për së gjalli, ashtu sic bëjnë më të shumtët e njerëzve, në të shumtën e kohës. Besoj se kjo është rruga më e mire.

I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move,and it is slow in starting.

The one experience that he had never had he was not going to spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn't

The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Everything good he had ever written he'd made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn't understand. They thought it was all experience. Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he had never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that.

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

But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.