Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
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No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.
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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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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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You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]
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Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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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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A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.
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Let him think is I am more man than I am and I will be so.
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Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do.
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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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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
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There are worse places to be than on your own.
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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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Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
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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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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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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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Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.
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Drinking is a way of ending the day.
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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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In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.