Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Ernest Hemingway
Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

Ernest Hemingway
We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

Ernest Hemingway
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

Ernest Hemingway
'You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
'Write how you are but make it straight.'

Ernest Hemingway
Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.

Ernest Hemingway
I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?

Ernest Hemingway
Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well

Ernest Hemingway
How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
Ezra [Pound] was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Ernest Hemingway
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway
If you have to go away,' she said,'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything?...

Ernest Hemingway
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

Ernest Hemingway
If the people of Spain have one common trait it is pride, and, if they have another, it is common sense, and if they have a third, it is impracticality.

Ernest Hemingway
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

Ernest Hemingway
I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world—or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

Ernest Hemingway
Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

Ernest Hemingway
But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.

Ernest Hemingway
All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

Ernest Hemingway
Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

Ernest Hemingway
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.

Ernest Hemingway
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Ernest Hemingway
In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.

Ernest Hemingway
If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

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

Ernest Hemingway
The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.

Ernest Hemingway
When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.

Ernest Hemingway