Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”

“My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.”

“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.”

“Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.”

“Everyone has his own conscience,and there should be no rules abouthow a conscience should function.”

“You never understand anybody that loves you.”

“You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.”

“Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”

“A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

“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.”

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.”

“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

“Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn't really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born.”

“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.”

“Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.”

“However you make your living is where your talent lies.”

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.”

“I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

“Look at thingsand listenand feel.”

“The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.”

“How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.”

“Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.”