Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
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There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
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People fall in love, but have to climb out.
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Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.
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Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.
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It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
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When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
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it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
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I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.
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I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
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Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.
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A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
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By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
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Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
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Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
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I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.
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For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
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A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.
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That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
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Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.
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I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.
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You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.
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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.