Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
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The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.
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All bad writers are in love with the epic.
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Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
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There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
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I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
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You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.
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Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?
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I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
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Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.
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In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.
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Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.
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It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.
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Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
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In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
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There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
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Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
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Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.
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I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
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To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.
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Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.
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I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.
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I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.