Quotes by Hemingway, Ernest

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature   

"Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times."

Hemingway, Ernest on love   

"Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, What will you have, sir? And I said, A glass of hemlock."

Hemingway, Ernest on marriage   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on modesty   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on morality
3 fans of this quote   

"Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment."

Hemingway, Ernest on obscenity   

"A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death."

Hemingway, Ernest on paradise   

"I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink."

Hemingway, Ernest on patriotism   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on people   

"Man is not made for defeat."

Hemingway, Ernest on potential   

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

Hemingway, Ernest on prayer   

"When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes."

Hemingway, Ernest on public office   

"Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light."

Hemingway, Ernest on publishing and publishers   

"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end"

Hemingway, Ernest on purpose
6 fans of this quote   

"I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently."

Hemingway, Ernest on creation   

"Retirement is the ugliest word in the language."

Hemingway, Ernest on retirement   

"The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, The very rich are different from you and me. And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money."

Hemingway, Ernest on riches   

"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

Hemingway, Ernest on humor   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on simplicity   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on sports   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on story and story-telling   

"I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made."

Hemingway, Ernest on style   

"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering."

Hemingway, Ernest on biography   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on books - reading   

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Hemingway, Ernest on books - reading   

"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

Hemingway, Ernest on brevity   

"Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved."

Hemingway, Ernest on survival   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on swearing   

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Hemingway, Ernest on symbols   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on travel   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on truth   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on truth   

"The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded."

Hemingway, Ernest on twentieth century   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on uncertainty   

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."

Hemingway, Ernest on war   

"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."

Hemingway, Ernest on widowhood
3 fans of this quote   

"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."

Hemingway, Ernest on wine   

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

Hemingway, Ernest on words
3 fans of this quote   

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."

Hemingway, Ernest on words   

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

Hemingway, Ernest on words