Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
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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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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 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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Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.
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I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
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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.
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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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Write hard and clear about what hurts.
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All bad writers are in love with the epic.
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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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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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The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
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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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Live it up so you can write it down.
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You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.
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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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Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.
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The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.
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You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.
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My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.
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Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.
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I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be