Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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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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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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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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Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad.
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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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The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
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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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All bad writers are in love with the epic.
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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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Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
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You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.
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I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
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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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There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
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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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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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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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I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.
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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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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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Live it up so you can write it down.
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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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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 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.