Ernest Hemingway Quotes (296 Quotes)

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and, because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

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

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

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

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. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky When you are cold and wet what else can warm you Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran in

The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ''The very rich are different from you and me.'' And how someone had said to Julian, ''Yes, they have more money.''

You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports ... all others are games.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

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.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.

Live life to the fullest.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.