Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

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 was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Ernest Hemingway
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
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
The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

Ernest Hemingway
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Ernest Hemingway
This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Ernest Hemingway
Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.

Ernest Hemingway
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

Ernest Hemingway
I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Ernest Hemingway
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Ernest Hemingway
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway
You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?

Ernest Hemingway
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

Ernest Hemingway
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Ernest Hemingway
Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.

Ernest Hemingway
We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

Ernest Hemingway
The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Ernest Hemingway
Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

Ernest Hemingway
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

Ernest Hemingway
In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Ernest Hemingway
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Ernest Hemingway
'But are there not many Fascists in your country?'
'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'.

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

Ernest Hemingway