Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
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Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
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The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
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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.
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Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
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Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
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Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.
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The only decent bone in her body was mine.
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It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
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Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.
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Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.
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Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.
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Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.
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I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
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Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
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Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.
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There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
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Never mistake motion for action.
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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
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There is no rule on how to write.
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A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
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Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.
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The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.
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The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.