Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

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.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

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.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Man is not made for defeat.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

Courage is grace under pressure.

You’re beautiful, like a May fly.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

On the ‚Star,‘ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Never mistake motion for action.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.