Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.

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

A big lie is more plausible than truth.

Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.

It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin." The Old Man and the Sea

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

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

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

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places.

In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.

Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.

wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

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

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

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

Everybody has something wrong with them.

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.

All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

You never understand anybody that loves you.

In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.

Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.

Work could cure almost anything

People fall in love, but have to climb out.

'Safety', the wife of Pablo said. 'There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.'