Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.
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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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Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
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Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
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Good dialogue is not real speech-it's the illusion of real speech.
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Time is the least thing we have.
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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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Worry destroys the ability to write.
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Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.
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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
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A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
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you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
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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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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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Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
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Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
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I was blown up while we were eating cheese.
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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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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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You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.
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All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.