Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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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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.
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Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
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You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.
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Your blood coagulates beautifully.
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Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
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The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
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You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
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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.
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It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.
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I drink to make other people more interesting.
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But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.
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What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
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I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
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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.
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
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The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.
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Tell me some true things about fighting.''Tell me you love me.''I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.
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One cat just leads to another.
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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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If my Valentine you won't be, I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.
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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
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The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
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A good life is not measured by any biblical span.