Ernest Hemingway

Quotes

• “I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form...”
• “I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Critici...”
• “Hemingway's famous phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (20 April 1926), published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Le...”
• “Source: quoted in Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway, which first appeared in the The New Yorker (13 May 1950). The pro...”
• “Antonio always prayed in the room before the fight at the last when the well-wishers and the followers were gone. If the...”
• “In an American Literature class, the professor told us The Sun Also Rises was boring on purpose. Apparently, Hemingway w...”
• “What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not mea...”
• “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the in...”
• “I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their...”
• “I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all danc...”
• “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if th...”
• “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 f...”
• “You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, th...”
• “Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about tha...”
• “In his history of war correspondence, British author Phillip Knightley, a [Spanish] loyalist sympathizer, chastizes [sic...”
• “Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done withou...”
• “I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's mascu...”
• “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it ...”
• “The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, w...”
• “A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on neces...”
• “The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to th...”
• “All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully ...”
• “Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, "Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderfu...”
• “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one ...”
• “We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the powe...”
• “Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his...”
• “We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us ...”
• “My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good de...”
• “One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were ch...”
• “Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate [in his pamphlet Germany Must Perish] how many doctors an...”
• “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop w...”
• “Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times fro...”
• “Everyone tries to frighten you now by saying or writing that if one does not become a communist or have a Marxian viewpo...”
• “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed a...”
• “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can co...”
• “:"I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer," I told Portago, "somethi...”
• “A writer is like a Gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer, he will never like the govern...”
• “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie ...”
• “Letter to his family (18 October 1918); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlo...”
• “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perf...”
• “The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious....”
• “It is July 1959 and Hemingway is in Marceliano's bar in Pamplona, where he has not been since before the Spanish Civil W...”
• “I wonder what your idea of heaven would be - A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and member...”
• “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...”
• “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 reme...”
• “For Isaac Kotlarz, reinterpreting the past went together with a certain bad conscience: "Later on, when I read Hemingway...”
• “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western s...”
• “I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First, I would look after myself and do my wor...”
• “War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, d...”
• “An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn ...”