Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

Drinking is a way of ending the day.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.

I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

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 when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.

As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.

All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.

How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.

As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.

Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.

Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.

I was always embarresed by the words 'sacred,' 'glorious,' and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen

Isn't it pretty to think so.

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

People fall in love, but have to climb out.

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her