Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
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I drink to make other people more interesting.
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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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Anyone can be a fisherman in May.
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Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
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No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things
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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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How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.
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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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where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.
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The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day ... you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
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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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I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
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Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.
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People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
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Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
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Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.
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To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
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Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
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And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.' 'What did you say?' 'I said we could have everything.' 'We can have everything.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can have the whole world.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can go everywhere.' 'No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.' 'It's ours.' 'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.
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I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
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The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.