Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.
-
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.
-
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
-
A big lie is more plausible than truth.
-
Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.
-
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
-
I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.
-
Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
-
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
-
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
-
The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.
-
To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.
-
It is very bad for (an artist) to talk about how he (creates). It is not the (artist's) province to explain or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. It's none of their business that you had to learn. Let them think you were born that way.
-
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
-
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
-
Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.
-
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.
-
Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new things
-
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
-
In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.
-
People fall in love, but have to climb out.
-
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
-
It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.
-
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.