Quotes About Experience

When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew that it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel.

YOU DO NOT know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

L'amore è l'amore e il divertimento è divertimento. Ma c'è sempre un tale silenzio quando muore un pesciolino rosso.

One can learn about wines and pursue the education of one's palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine even though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely.

In the early days writing in Paris I would invent not only from my own experience but from the experiences and knowledge of my friends and all the people I had known, or met since I could remember, who were not writers. I was very lucky always that my best friends were not writers and to have known many intelligent people who were articulate.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Then we ate even smaller eels alone cooked in oil and as tiny as bean sprouts and curled in all directions and so tender they disappeared in the mouth without chewing.

I've never read anything, though, that could make you feel about the country the way we feel about it. . . I'd like to try to write something about the country and the animals and what it's like to some one who knows nothing about it.

Le mille volte che già lo aveva dimostrato non avevano importanza. Ora lo stava dimostrando di nuovo. Ogni volta era una volta nuova, e non pensava mai al passato, quando lo faceva.

This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.

You see, Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well.

He missed a lot in his life. -That no one ever knows. Everything in life has it's compensation.

The dancers were in a crowd, so you did not see the intricate play of the feet. All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down.

We're no kin, Thomas Hudson said. We just used to live in the same town and make some of the same mistakes.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

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. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.

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

You cannot know about it unless you have it.

Ahora: una palabra curiosa para expresar todo un mundo y toda una vida

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel

You corrupt very easily, he thought. But was it corruption or was it merely that you lost the naïveté that you started with?

My mojito in the Bodeguita del Medio and my daiquiri in the Floridita.