Ernest Hemingway Quotes

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.

I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

When you have a child, the world has a hostage.

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.

I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

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.

Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

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.

Not the why but the what.

Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.

You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't want to destroy me again, would you?

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.

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.

This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let's go and beat this guy up and come back and drink some more beer.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.