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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Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
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When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
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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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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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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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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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Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.
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A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.
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Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
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You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
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How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
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God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
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To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.
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You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.
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I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.
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Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.
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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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No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.
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He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.
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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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In war, one cannot say what one feels.
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
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He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.