Ernest Hemingway Quotes

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.

I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.

I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night." "I want to go home and into bed." "We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.

If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.

But I think the Great DiMaggio would be proud of me today.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

Courage is grace under pressure.

You're awfully dark, brother," he said. "You don't know how dark.

Yes, they have more money.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.

Hunger is good discipline.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. 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.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.

Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.

Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.

There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

The best writing is certainly when you are in love

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Never confuse movement with action.