Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.”

“Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.”

“I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)”

“it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.”

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

“It's a town you come to for a short time.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.”

“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”

“The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.”

“An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

“Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.”

“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.”

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

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”

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

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

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

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

“Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.”

“Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.”

“He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."”