Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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.

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

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness, and often his work deteriorates. 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Time is the least thing we have of.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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

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

Never confuse movement with action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.