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
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Morals, Morality
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 am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Legacy, Biography
I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine
Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Retirement
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
Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Defense
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Style
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Intelligence, Happiness
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Intelligence
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Heaven
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
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: Literature, Books
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Listening
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words
A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Paradise
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Fear, Anxiety, Courage, Coward, Cowardice
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Comedy
I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Appearance
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Exaggeration
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
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Learning
The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Lies
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Adversity, Strength
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
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Evil
Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway
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
You write a book like 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
Topics: Hollywood
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