Ernest Hemingway Quotations

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

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.


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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Never confuse movement with action.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

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

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.

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

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.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

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

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

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 is no friend as loyal as a book.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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.

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

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.

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

Courage is grace under pressure.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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