Ernest Hemingway Quotes

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is

A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

What is moral is what you feel good after.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a wonderful discovery.

We wait always for something that does not come.

I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.

Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.

In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.

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 it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.

Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.

If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

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

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.

Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

Work could cure almost anything

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.

I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.

To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.