Ernest Hemingway Quotes

They arrested us after breakfast.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

It is very bad for (an artist) to talk about how he (creates). It is not the (artist's) province to explain or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. It's none of their business that you had to learn. Let them think you were born that way.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.

It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day ... you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?

I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color." - Ernest Hemingway.

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.

'Safety', the wife of Pablo said. 'There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.'

Optimism can keep a fool from accepting failure.

The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

No one ever stopped when they were winning.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.