Ernest Hemingway Quotes

My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.

Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled.

I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

There are worse places to be than on your own.

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.

Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]

Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.

One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.

Man is not made for defeat.

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

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

Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do.

Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.

We have very primitive emotions,” he said . “It's impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

Life is the best left hooker I ever saw, although some say it was Charlie White of Chicago

The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.