Top 60 Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

On the ‘Star,’ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

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.

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.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

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.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

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.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

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

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

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.

Never mistake motion for action.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

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

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

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.

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.

Man is not made for defeat.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.