Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.

It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.

Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Life is pain, so live it up while you can.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

I'm tired of everybody. Please forgive me.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.

The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

Live it up so you can write it down.

You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.

He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.