Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.
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But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
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Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
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Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.
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Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.
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The further you go in writing the more alone you are.
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The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
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I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.
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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
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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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Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
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Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.
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All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.
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He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.
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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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No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.
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So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.
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There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
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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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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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The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.