Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
Write drunk; edit sober.
-
What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
-
But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
-
Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.
-
Life is pain, so live it up while you can.
-
Optimism can keep a fool from accepting failure.
-
Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.
-
Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.
-
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
-
Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.
-
America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.
-
The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.
-
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.)
-
Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.
-
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
-
Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.
-
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.
-
Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.
-
When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely.
-
Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.
-
We wait always for something that does not come.
-
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.
-
Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.
-
You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.