Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
-
This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it
-
One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
-
You're awfully dark, brother," he said. "You don't know how dark.
-
How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.
-
First, there must be talent. . .Then there must be discipline. . .Then there must be. . .and absolute conscience. . .to prevent faking.
-
You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
-
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.
-
God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her
-
I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.
-
Never mistake motion for action.
-
Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
-
The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
-
Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn't really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born.
-
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.
-
I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.
-
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.
-
Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.
-
Hunger is good discipline.
-
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
-
She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.
-
No one you love is ever truly lost.
-
Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.
-
There are worse places to be than on your own.