Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. At the height of his popularity, this 1954 Nobel laureate was acknowledged as the most celebrated literary stylists of the 20th century.
Hemmingway’s life and literary career were contentious from the outset. The Hemingway machismo persona included hard-drinking, a confrontational disposition, and a penchant for bullfights, prizefights, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing.
Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. His father, a doctor, introduced Hemingway to the rituals of hunting and fishing. His mother was religious and musical. Much of Hemingway’s later creativity was inspired by reminiscences of vacation trips to northern Michigan, the setting of some of his most extraordinary stories.
After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway became a journalist in Paris, where he came into contact with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and other writers. He later served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Hemingway’s principal literary theme is war—as a personal and symbolic experience, moral condition, and a steady-state of the human spirit. His notable works include The Sun Also Rises (1926,) A Farewell to Arms (1929,) For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940,) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952; Pulitzer, 1953.) His collections of stories include Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933.)
During his life, Hemingway was a celebrity whose every move was reported in the newspapers and magazines of his day. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Idaho’s Sun Valley, word of his death made front-page news around the world. A number of his significant works, including A Moveable Feast (1964,) The Nick Adams Stories (1972,) and The Dangerous Summer (1985,) were published after his death.
Most of Hemingway’s novels and many of his short stories have been made into feature films. He has inspired numerous full-length biographies, countless personal remembrances by family and friends, and many books of criticism.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ernest Hemingway
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Spring, People
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Cats
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
—Ernest Hemingway
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
—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
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Exaggeration
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Luck
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Adversity, Strength
Here is the piece. If you can’t say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit?. If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Vulgarity, Profanity, Swearing
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Intelligence
You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Literature, Criticism
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: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Letters
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently. Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Simplicity
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway
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
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Listening
I know now that there is no one thing that is true—it is all true.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Truth
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Coward, Courage, Anxiety, Fear, Cowardice
I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Fighting, Fight
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authority
I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
—Ernest Hemingway
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
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
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