Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.”

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”

“The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.”

“[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)”

“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.”

“I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.”

“Life is the best left hooker I ever saw, although some say it was Charlie White of Chicago”

“You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.”

“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.”

“I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.”

“Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.”

“In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

“Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”

“But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

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

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”

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

“The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.”

“Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.”

“Before you quit, you have to try”