Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Ernest Hemingway
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Ernest Hemingway
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run... but thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

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
'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.'
'Yes.'
'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'

Ernest Hemingway
There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.

Ernest Hemingway
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Ernest Hemingway
Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Ernest Hemingway
The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.

Ernest Hemingway
All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.

Ernest Hemingway
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway
They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.

Ernest Hemingway
If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Ernest Hemingway
I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.

Ernest Hemingway
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again,... to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

Ernest Hemingway
It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Ernest Hemingway
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Ernest Hemingway
It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

Ernest Hemingway
A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.

Ernest Hemingway
I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.

Ernest Hemingway