Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.

Ernest Hemingway
He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.

Ernest Hemingway
Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.

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
If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

Ernest Hemingway
All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.

Ernest Hemingway
You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.

Ernest Hemingway
I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'" "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste." Brett's glass was empty.

Ernest Hemingway
Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something

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
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.

Ernest Hemingway
You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't want to destroy me again, would you?

Ernest Hemingway
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Ernest Hemingway
'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'

Ernest Hemingway
This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.

Ernest Hemingway
A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

Ernest Hemingway
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Ernest Hemingway
This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.

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
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
Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

Ernest Hemingway
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

Ernest Hemingway
You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

Ernest Hemingway
No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

Ernest Hemingway
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway