Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
I don't know, the boy said. All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

Ernest Hemingway
He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Ernest Hemingway
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

Ernest Hemingway
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.

Ernest Hemingway
There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.

Ernest Hemingway
And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Ernest Hemingway
Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Ernest Hemingway
There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.

Ernest Hemingway
I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.

Ernest Hemingway
Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.

Ernest Hemingway
I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

Ernest Hemingway
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

Ernest Hemingway
So far, 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 and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine.

Ernest Hemingway
The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

Ernest Hemingway
A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.

Ernest Hemingway
For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

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
The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

Ernest Hemingway
Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

Ernest Hemingway
Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

Ernest Hemingway
Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new things

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

Ernest Hemingway
Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

Ernest Hemingway
There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Ernest Hemingway
Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.

Ernest Hemingway
I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.

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

Ernest Hemingway
I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

Ernest Hemingway
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

Ernest Hemingway
It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

Ernest Hemingway