Ernest Hemingway Quotes

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

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.

Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.

French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.

The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

They arrested us after breakfast.

The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.

I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?

There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

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

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

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

The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen

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

Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.

Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.

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

Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope).

Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?