Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. 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

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is, so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

~ Ernest Hemingway

It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone.

~ Ernest Hemingway

At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish,” he said. “Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.

~ Ernest Hemingway

He was mad and plenty brave.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

~ Ernest Hemingway

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. ... Harry didn't say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I had gone...to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.

~ Ernest Hemingway

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

~ Ernest Hemingway

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

~ Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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.

~ Ernest Hemingway

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

~ Ernest Hemingway

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

I wonder. Of course maybe that isn't what they figure to do. Maybe they aren't going to do any such thing. But it's natural that's what they would do and I heard that word.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

~ Ernest Hemingway

She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things

~ Ernest Hemingway

I do not think I have 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. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

~ Ernest Hemingway

One cat just leads to another.[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

~ Ernest Hemingway

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To show his nervousness was not shameful, only to admit it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Don't you believe I love you? Don't know how I can make you believe. I didn't want to kiss you goodbye--that was the trouble--I wanted to kiss you goodnight. […] Of course I love you. I love you all the time. […] I'd like to hold you and kiss you so that you wouldn't doubt whether I wanted to or not.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

~ Ernest Hemingway

He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven?

~ Ernest Hemingway

Besides, I'm not jealous. I'm just so in love with you that there isn't anything else.

~ Ernest Hemingway

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

~ Ernest Hemingway