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Home: Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Journalist
Born On
1899-07-21
Died On
1961-07-02
Birth Place
Oak Park, Illinois, United States
Death Place
Ketchum
Birth Sign
cancer
Father
Clarence Edmonds Hemingway
Mother
Grace Hall-Hemingway
Spouse
Hadley Richardson, Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945), Mary Welsh Hemingway, Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1940)
Nationality
American
Education
1917 - Oak Park and River Forest High School
Writers, Novelists, Short Story Writers

‘A Farewell to Arms’ author, Ernest Hemingway was a colorful personality—blunt, extroverted with an extremely high opinion of his talent. He was great friends with contemporary writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their relationship (though short-lived owing to their respective careers) created fascinating stories that we recount even today. Once Zelda, Fitzgerald’s wife, complained that her husband was incapable of satiating her sexual needs. Such an observation of course saddened ‘The Great Gatsby’ writer and he chose to confide in his friend Hemingway.

He took Hemingway with him to a public restroom in Paris and took off his pants, eager for an honest opinion. Ernest complimented Scott’s man part and for further encouragement advised that he visit the Louvre so that he could compare it with what the statues had. This hilarious incident was later retold by Hemingway in his narrative, ‘A Moveable Feast’.

Later, the two exceptional novelists continued to be in touch through letters. In one such letter, Fitzgerald advised Ernest how to write the perfect ending to ‘A Farewell to Arms’. Hemingway wasn’t too happy about being told how to write, and replied with a “Kiss my ass”. The same Hemingway sent Fitzgerald a correspondence, suggesting the latter should “toss two parts of his manhood into the sea, if he even had them anymore”. This remark came right after Scott had published the essay, ‘The Crack Up’.

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

Nothing
Ernest Hemingway

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

Literature
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Trust
Ernest Hemingway

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

Defeat
Ernest Hemingway

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

Strength World
Ernest Hemingway

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

Nothing
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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

Greatness People Learning
Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure.

Courage Grace
Ernest Hemingway

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

World Fighting Hatred
Ernest Hemingway

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

Beauty
Ernest Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Life Rest
Ernest Hemingway

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

Time Intelligence
Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Love Travelling
Ernest Hemingway

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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

Life Love Sleep
Ernest Hemingway

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Friendship
Ernest Hemingway

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Life
Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Death Good Love
Ernest Hemingway

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Dignity Water
Ernest Hemingway

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Good Wars
Ernest Hemingway

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

People
Ernest Hemingway

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Good Depression
Ernest Hemingway

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Things Incorruptibility
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Fathers
Ernest Hemingway

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

People Happiness
Ernest Hemingway

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Good People Happiness
Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Ability Imagination
Ernest Hemingway

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Night Communication
Ernest Hemingway

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

Good
Ernest Hemingway

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Death
Ernest Hemingway

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Talent Time
Ernest Hemingway

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Greatness Sports
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Good
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Wars Nation
Ernest Hemingway

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Death Art Honor
Ernest Hemingway

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Business
Ernest Hemingway

Time is the least thing we have of.

Time
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Good Time
Ernest Hemingway

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Ernest Hemingway

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Defeat Things Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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

Good
Ernest Hemingway

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Ernest Hemingway

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Good Books
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Age Risk
Ernest Hemingway

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Good Sweet Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Success Work
Ernest Hemingway

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

Love People
Ernest Hemingway

Man is not made for defeat.

Defeat
Ernest Hemingway

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

Funny Penalty / Chastisement
Ernest Hemingway

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Wars Wealth
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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

Death Wealth Fear
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Architecture
Ernest Hemingway

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

Mind
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Fishing
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Greatness Time Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Hope
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Cool Work
Ernest Hemingway

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

Right Wars
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Life Experience
Ernest Hemingway

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Life Time Words
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Greatness Good Fortune
Ernest Hemingway

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Death Pleasure
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Architecture Country Style
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

People Character
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Right Time
Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Endurance Honor
Ernest Hemingway

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Knowledge
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Things
Ernest Hemingway

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

Good
Ernest Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Words
Ernest Hemingway

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

Farewell
Ernest Hemingway

'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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Responsibility
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Time Work
Ernest Hemingway

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.

Greatness
Ernest Hemingway

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Love
Ernest Hemingway

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