Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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.
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How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.
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I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her
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Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.
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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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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.
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Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
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Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.
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Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
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Hunger is good discipline.
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Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.
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There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.
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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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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.
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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.
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Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.
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I was always embarresed by the words 'sacred,' 'glorious,' and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
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And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.
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There are worse places to be than on your own.
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If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
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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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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.