Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.
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Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
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The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.
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There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
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My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
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I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
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I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.
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It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.
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The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
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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.
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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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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.
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He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.
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How little we know of what there is to know.
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I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
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The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
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I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
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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.
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In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.
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As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
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Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever.
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Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.
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My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
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An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.