Ernest Hemingway Quotes (296 Quotes)

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

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.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that does

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

There are only three sports bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering all the rest are merely games.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

In 1941, For Whom the Bell Tolls ... a style so mannered and eccentric as to be frequently absurd.

The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

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.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

Man is not made for defeat.

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun We are born lucky. Yes, we are born lucky.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see You hang around cafTs.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

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

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.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the w

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

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 hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds.

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

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.

I know the night is not the same as the day that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.