Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

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

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a wonderful discovery.

Optimism can keep a fool from accepting failure.

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.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

Yes, they have more money.

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.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

When things are going well, I like to have people to share it with. I've been alone in troubled times, and I don't mind that. Some things have to be endured alone. As Hemingway said, the human being is strong in all the broken places.

The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

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

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

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.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

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.

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new things

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

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

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.

One cat just leads to another.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

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

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.

There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

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

But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

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.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?