Ernest Hemingway Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by 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
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The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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'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
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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
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There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
~Ernest Hemingway
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For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
~Ernest Hemingway
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The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
~Ernest Hemingway
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It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
~Ernest Hemingway
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Man is not made for defeat.
~Ernest Hemingway
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The shortest answer is doing the thing.
~Ernest Hemingway
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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
~Ernest Hemingway
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The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Never mistake motion for action.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
~Ernest Hemingway
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There is no friend as loyal as a book.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
~Ernest Hemingway
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My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Time is the least thing we have of.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
~Ernest Hemingway
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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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All things truly wicked start from innocence.
~Ernest Hemingway
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As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
~Ernest Hemingway
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
~Ernest Hemingway
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I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
~Ernest Hemingway
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
~Ernest Hemingway
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Courage is grace under pressure.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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You're beautiful, like a May fly.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
~Ernest Hemingway
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All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
~Ernest Hemingway
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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
~Ernest Hemingway
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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.
~Ernest Hemingway
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