Top 824 Quotes & Sayings by Ernest Hemingway - Page 2

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

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.

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.

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

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

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

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

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

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

Man is not made for defeat.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

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.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

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.

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.

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

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

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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

The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Everybody has something wrong with them.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be.

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.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.