Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (Page 2 of 4)

Being against evil doesn't make you good.

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, What will you have, sir? And I said, A glass of hemlock.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.

I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.

You are all a lost generation. with credit to Gertrude Stein.

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood.

After the New Yorker piece I decided that I would never give another interview to anyone on any subject and that I would keep away from all places where I would be likely to be interviewed. If you say nothing it is difficult for someone to get it wrong.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

No horse named Morbid ever won a race.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.

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.

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do.

I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your nerves.

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

I do not want you ever to initiate any action for any refunds of taxes without first consulting me and presenting the matter fully to me so that I may judge whether it is an honorable and ethical action to take, not simply legally, but according to my own personal standards.

Con not, that thou be not conned.

I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.

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.

One cat just leads to another.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.

Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.

And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

It is not bad, Santiago said. And pain does not matter to a man.

I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I've lost 30 pounds.

Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.

A bottle of wine was good company.

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it's over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that's rare. That's rare and valuable.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.

If my Valentine you won't be, I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't want to destroy me again, would you?

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

The only decent bone in her body was mine.

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

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.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.

Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best -- make it all up -- but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.

He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane with the other people of the island and the bond that the hurricane made between all people who had been through it. He also knew that hurricanes could be so bad that nothing could live through them.

Never fall in love? Always, said the count. I am always in love.

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.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.

Experiencing differences is crucial to the human condition. Especially when that difference is over the head, blower powder.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

How little we know of what there is to know.

I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.

Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.

I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.

There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.