Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.
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Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.
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Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
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I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
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The only decent bone in her body was mine.
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We wait always for something that does not come.
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But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
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Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
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A cat has absolute honesty.
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Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.
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And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.
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A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.
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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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It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
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For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.
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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
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The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.
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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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But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.
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Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.
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Look at things and listen and feel.
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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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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
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Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.