Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the wndow of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.

Ernest Hemingway
Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

Ernest Hemingway
What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
All things to be truly wicked must start from an innocence.

Ernest Hemingway
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