Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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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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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It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
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And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.
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You never understand anybody that loves 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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Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.
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A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
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Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
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I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
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You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]
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It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
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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.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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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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No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
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All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.
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Good writing is good conversation, only more so.
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Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
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Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
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My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.
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There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.