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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It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.
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When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.
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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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I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)
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The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
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And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.' 'What did you say?' 'I said we could have everything.' 'We can have everything.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can have the whole world.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can go everywhere.' 'No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.' 'It's ours.' 'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.
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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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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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This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it
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Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
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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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A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
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His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
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All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
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And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?
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Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.
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I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.
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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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Courage is grace under pressure.
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The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
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But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.
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He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.
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In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.