Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
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If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
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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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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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When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
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My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.
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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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And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.
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Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
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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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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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I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
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I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.
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Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
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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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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it's over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that's rare. That's rare and valuable.
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
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It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.
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My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.