Ernest Hemingway Quotes

My big fish must be somewhere.

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

I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.

I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

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

Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.

If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

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

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

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

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.

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

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.

I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

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.

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

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

Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.

I am an old man who will live until I die," Anselmo said.

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.

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

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.

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 another.

Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.

Isn't it pretty to think so.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.

If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.