Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.
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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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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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As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
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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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What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
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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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A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
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Worry destroys the ability to write.
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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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I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
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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 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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One cat just leads to another.
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The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
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Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.
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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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Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
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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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One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.
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I drink to make other people more interesting.
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Courage is grace under pressure.
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Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.
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The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.