Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."

This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it

It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.

I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .

All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.

I felt very lonely when they were all there.

Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.

Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.

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. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.

Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.

[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)

And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

Write drunk; edit sober.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I've lost 30 pounds.

I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

A bottle of wine was good company.

Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

If my Valentine you won't be, I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.