Quotes About Struggle

God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful...

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. There is nothing worse than war. Defeat is worse. I do not believe it, Passini said still respectfully. What is defeat? You go home.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

The fish is my friend too... I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Religion is the opium of the poor

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

You roll back to me.

War is not won by victory.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to 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.

We have very primative emotions. It's impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.