Top 824 Quotes & Sayings by Ernest Hemingway - Page 11

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.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

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

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?

I am always in love.

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.

He knew he would not be afraid. Even if he ever was afraid he knew that he could do it anyway.

But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.

Let him think is I am more man than I am and I will be so.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.

As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.

Time is the least thing we have.

We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.

Live it up so you can write it down.

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."

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 is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.

To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

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 never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.

If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.

For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.

Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.

In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.

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

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.

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.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.

Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No

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

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

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

(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.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.

It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.

Isn't it pretty to think so.