Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
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A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
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Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
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Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
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You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.
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To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
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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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Easy writing makes hard reading.
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Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.
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Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.
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Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .
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In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
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Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
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I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.
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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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You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.
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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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Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.
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Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.
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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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How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
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There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!
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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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Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.