Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
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The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.
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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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There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
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Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.
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Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.
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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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It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.
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Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
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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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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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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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I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.
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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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Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.
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It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
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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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Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had 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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We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.
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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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I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.