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
Topics: Survival
Life breaks us all, but afterwards, many of us are strongest at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Contentment
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they’re all camp followers.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Criticism, Critics
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: War
Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Publishers, Publishing, Books
Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Love
The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: World
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Exaggeration
It’s enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it’s good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Excellence
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last in it, and not be smashed by it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Humor
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Weapon
The bombers … move W
A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Paradise
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Evil
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: War
In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine
Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Life and Living
To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Father, Fathers, Family
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Happiness, Intelligence
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
—Ernest Hemingway
There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
—Ernest Hemingway
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
Topics: Morality, Simplicity, Morals, Simple Living
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
Topics: Marriage
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doing
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Sports
I know now that there is no one thing that is true—it is all true.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Truth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- Helen Keller American Author
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- James Agee American Man of Letters
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Polish-born American Children’s Books Writer
- Washington Irving American Author
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Robert W. Service Scottish Poet
- William Faulkner American Novelist
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist
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