Top 824 Quotes & Sayings by Ernest Hemingway - Page 9

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 it again.

Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action.

All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

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

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.

The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .

I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

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.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

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

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new things

Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.

Il faut d'abord durer (First One Must Endure).

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.

My big fish must be somewhere.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

Always quit for the day when you know what you want to do next.

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

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it.

No horse named Morbid ever won a race.

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.

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.

Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.

Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.

He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.

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

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

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.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.

I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.

The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad.