Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“All bad writers are in love with the epic.”

“I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.”

“Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.”

“You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.”

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.”

“When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.”

“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.”

“There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.”

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

“I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.”

“My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.”

“I am always in love.”

“I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.”

“Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“Where do the noses go? I always wondered where the noses would go.”

“(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”

“Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.”

“'Safety', the wife of Pablo said. 'There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.'”

“In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”

“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”

“One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]”