Quotes by Hemingway, Ernest

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."

Hemingway, Ernest on adversity
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"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

Hemingway, Ernest on age and aging
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"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on decadence   

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

Hemingway, Ernest on defeat
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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."

Hemingway, Ernest on depression
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"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

Hemingway, Ernest on dictionaries   

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."

Hemingway, Ernest on doctors   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on economy and economics
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"Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre."

Hemingway, Ernest on evil   

"Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones."

Hemingway, Ernest on exaggeration
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"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

Hemingway, Ernest on excellence
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"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around caf?s."

Hemingway, Ernest on exile   

"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused."

Hemingway, Ernest on experience
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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."

Hemingway, Ernest on fathers   

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

Hemingway, Ernest on fiction   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on fiction
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"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."

Hemingway, Ernest on fights and fighting   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on fishing   

"There is no friend as loyal as a book"

Hemingway, Ernest on friends and friendship
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"I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't."

Hemingway, Ernest on airplane and aviation   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on alcohol and alcoholism
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"Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief."

Hemingway, Ernest on alcohol and alcoholism
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"My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."

Hemingway, Ernest on grammar
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"To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors."

Hemingway, Ernest on heaven
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"You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."

Hemingway, Ernest on hollywood   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on hunting   

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

Hemingway, Ernest on innocence
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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."

Hemingway, Ernest on invention and inventor
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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."

Hemingway, Ernest on journalism and journalists   

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

Hemingway, Ernest on learning   

"Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something."

Hemingway, Ernest on letters   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on life
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"I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist."

Hemingway, Ernest on appearance   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on listening
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"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

Hemingway, Ernest on criticism
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"How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature   

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature
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"All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature   

"Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature   

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature