Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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 when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
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The first draft of anything is sh*t.
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Good dialogue is not real speech-it's the illusion of real speech.
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Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
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Tell me some true things about fighting.''Tell me you love me.''I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.
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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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When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
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Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
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Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.
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I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.
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Live it up so you can write it down.
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I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.
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When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.
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But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.
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[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
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I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.
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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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I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.
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I was blown up while we were eating cheese.
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The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.
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He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone
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He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled.
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In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.