Ernest Hemingway Quotes

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled.

The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.

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

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

Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.

Time is the least thing we have.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Live it up so you can write it down.

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

I am always in love.

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.

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.

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

Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

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

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

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

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.

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

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

(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.

And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood.

Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.

Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.

But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]

You've such a lovely temperature.

Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.

Not the why but the what.

What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?

Never mistake movement for action

It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

In war, one cannot say what one feels.

Good dialogue is not real speech-it's the illusion of real speech.

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

I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.