Famous Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

  • Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s... More
  • I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one... More
  • All things truly wicked start from an innocence. More
  • They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those... More
  • The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness... More
  • I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first... More
  • Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. More
  • His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At... More
  • You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European... More
  • How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way... More
  • This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a... More
  • When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is... More
  • About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is... More
  • The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known... More
  • There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years... More
  • Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who... More
  • Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. More
  • There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be... More
  • All our words from loose using have lost their edge. More
  • Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that... More
  • A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or... More
  • Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied... More
  • Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil.... More
  • Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of... More
  • To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream... More
  • Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working... More
  • A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families... More
  • The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know... More
  • I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain.... More
  • There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is... More
  • In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more. More
  • Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as... More
  • I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in... More
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the... More
  • All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will... More
  • From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know... More
  • Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the... More
  • I started out very quiet and I beat Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat de Maupassant.... More
  • I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de... More
  • Grace under pressure. More
  • We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. More
  • When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and... More
  • When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the... More
  • The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both... More
  • All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you... More
  • If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over... More
  • Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause,... More
  • Personal columnists ... are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had... More
  • All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them... More
  • Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint... More
  • Never confuse movement with action. More
  • To be a successful father ... there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at... More
  • If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest... More
  • Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know... More
  • Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the... More
  • Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age. More
  • You write a book like that that you’re fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it,... More
  • The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are... More
  • It’s enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after... More
  • If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always... More
  • Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt... More
  • Pound’s crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the... More
  • Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be... More
  • Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over... More
  • He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have. More
  • The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. More
  • Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up. More
  • I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but... More
  • That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The... More
  • God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me... More
  • I’ve seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and... More
  • My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of... More
  • I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m... More
  • I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have... More
  • It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are... More
  • Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too... More
  • Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary... More
  • There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and... More
  • The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be... More
  • Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen... More
  • Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that... More
  • You see it’s awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you... More
  • I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while... More
  • Here is the piece. If you can’t say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say... More
  • A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. More
  • That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so... More
  • You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign... More
  • I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics... More
  • You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not... More
  • Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you... More
  • Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was... More
  • All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. More
  • The age demanded that we dance
    And jammed us into iron pants.
    And in the end the age was... More
  • In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see,... More
  • All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....... More
  • Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in... More
  • Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. More
  • The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and... More
  • Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder... More

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