Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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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Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
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For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
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I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.
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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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How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.
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You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
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However you make your living is where your talent lies.
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You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.
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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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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
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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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Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.
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Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.
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The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
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Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.
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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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But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.
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Hunger is good discipline.
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It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.
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The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
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To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.
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In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.
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He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.