Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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.
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A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
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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.
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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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Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?
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Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.
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God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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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.
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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. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
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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).
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It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
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We who have seen him now, light on his feet, smooth moving as a leopard, a young man with an old man's science, the most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen, may live to see him fat, slow, old, and bald taking a beating from a younger man. But I would like to hazard a prediction that whoever beats Joe Louis in an honest fight in the next fifteen years will have to get up the floor to do it.
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You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
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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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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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Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.
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As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
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You never understand anybody that loves you.
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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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There are worse places to be than on your own.
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We have very primitive emotions,” he said . “It's impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.
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No Pilar," Agustin said. "You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart.
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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.