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.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 1. |
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 7. |
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little
more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they
do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral
concepts.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 7. |
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.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 9. |
Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a
thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets
and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 9. |
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything
that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point,
being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that
the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly
what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then
the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and
makes something of his own.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 10. |
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than
that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then
outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no
happy end to it.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 11. |
Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears
it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder
with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be
punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up
again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you.
All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked
by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of
all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools
go through it many times.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 11. |
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death,
and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 11. |
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque
is over.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 16. |
A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer.
A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay,
but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 16. |
When writing a novel a writer should create living people;
people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 16. |
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 and the only heritage he has to leave.
Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 11. |