Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.
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The only kind of writing is rewriting.
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It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
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What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
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Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
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It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.
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One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
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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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Always quit for the day when you know what you want to do next.
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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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Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.
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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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Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.
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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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Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
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You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.
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When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.
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Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night." "I want to go home and into bed." "We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.
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I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
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The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.
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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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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 never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.