Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (Page 2 of 3)

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.

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.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Here's the beautiful lady with the beer.

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.

We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. -- Ernest Hemingway.

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.

The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin. The Old Man and the Sea.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

But did thee feel the earth move?

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.

For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Isn't it pretty to think so.

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

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.

Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.

Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.

We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.

Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.

We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore.

He wrote it exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.

Make it all up. But make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. Ernest Hemingway.

All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing.

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.

Some websites accepted each quote we create.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

Oh, darling, she said. You will be good to me, won't you?
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.
You will, won't you? She looked up at me. Because we're going to have a strange life.

What is moral is what you feel good after.

And chase hard and good and with no mistakes and do not overrun them.

The Purdey was not a Purdey but a straight-stocked long-barreled Scott live-pigeon full choke in both barrels thai I had bought from a lot of shotguns a dealer had brought down fron Udine to the Kechlers' villa in Codroipo.

You may not believe this. No one believes this, but it is true.

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

I'm going to stay with you. If you go to jail, we might as well both go.

I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

He was not in love yet, but he realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle.

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it some time. Try and take it.

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.

She had the lovely high cheekbones for arrogance.

The one who is doing the work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one poverty is hard on.
Heminway talking about his wife Hadley.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk... that will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-- -Ernest Hemingway.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty... The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

I am always in love.

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

It's a town you come to for a short time.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.