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

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

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

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

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

Ernest Hemingway