Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.

Ernest Hemingway
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Ernest Hemingway
Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.

Ernest Hemingway
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Ernest Hemingway
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.

Ernest Hemingway
But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.

Ernest Hemingway
I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

Ernest Hemingway
It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.

Ernest Hemingway
Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

Ernest Hemingway
You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you.

Ernest Hemingway
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?

Ernest Hemingway
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.

Ernest Hemingway
There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Ernest Hemingway
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

Ernest Hemingway
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Ernest Hemingway
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."

Ernest Hemingway
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
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
The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.

Ernest Hemingway
For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Ernest Hemingway
We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

Ernest Hemingway
The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

Ernest Hemingway
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

Ernest Hemingway
He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...

Ernest Hemingway
It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Ernest Hemingway
I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.

Ernest Hemingway
The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

Ernest Hemingway
I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.

Ernest Hemingway