Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.

Worry destroys the ability to write.

My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.

Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.

I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

There is no rule on how to write.

I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.

My big fish must be somewhere.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.

Il faut d'abord durer (First One Must Endure).

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.