Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true

He said true things, but called them by wrong names.

No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.

Think, In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence.

Whoso loves, believes the impossible.

Measure not the work until the day’s out and the labor done.

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.I awoke — and found that life was duty.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.

You lose it if you talk about it.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly in the only heritage he has to leave.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Never mistake motion for action.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.