Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

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.

As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

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.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

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.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.

A bottle of wine was good company.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

Every day above earth is a good day.

You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.

A person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine.

One cat just leads to another.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

What is moral is what you feel good after.

Most people never listen.

There are worse places to be than on your own.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

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.

There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.

The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

Everything is your fault if you're any damn good.

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.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

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.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

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.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.

Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.