Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
-
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
-
Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
-
Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.
-
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
-
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
-
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.
-
There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.
-
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
-
Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.
-
This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.
-
Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.
-
Look at things and listen and feel.
-
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
-
Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.
-
Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
-
I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
-
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.
-
There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.
-
Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.
-
Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.
-
When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.
-
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
-
Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.