Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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If a writer stops observing, he is finished.
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Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I'll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.
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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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When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
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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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It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
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You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.
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No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
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I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.
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Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
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People fall in love, but have to climb out.
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If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
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[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
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Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.
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Your blood coagulates beautifully.
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And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?
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We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance
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No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
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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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Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?
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A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
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Easy writing makes hard reading.
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If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.