Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Ernest Hemingway
You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.

Ernest Hemingway
Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

Ernest Hemingway
To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

Ernest Hemingway
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
Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.

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

Ernest Hemingway
Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

Ernest Hemingway
Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill.

Ernest Hemingway
The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.

Ernest Hemingway
We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Ernest Hemingway
I'm not brave any more darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me.

Ernest Hemingway
A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Ernest Hemingway
Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Ernest Hemingway
My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

Ernest Hemingway
All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

Ernest Hemingway
'Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.'
'You think so?'
'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'

Ernest Hemingway
Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.

Ernest Hemingway
Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

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

Ernest Hemingway
The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do — and what you do that makes you what you are — is to back up into the grave. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language.

Ernest Hemingway
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

Ernest Hemingway