Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short story writer whose works are characterized by terse minimalism and understatement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Sourced

• 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.
  • The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922)

• 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.
  • "Trout Fishing in Europe" The Toronto Star Weekly (17 November 1923)

• A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
  • Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• The age demanded that we dance
  And jammed us into iron pants.
  And in the end the age was handed
  The sort of shit that it demanded.
  • "The Age Demanded" in Der Querschnitt (February 1925); as quoted in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch

• My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
  • Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.
  • Letter to Sherwood Anderson (23 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)

• To me a 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 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)

• Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or 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
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)

• 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.
  • About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
  • "In Another Country" in Men Without Women (1927).

• Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Grace under pressure
  • Hemingway's definition of "guts" as recounted by Dorothy Parker in the New Yorker (30 November 1929)

• I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.
  • Letter to Marlene Dietrich (1 July 1930)

• Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
  • Letter (5-6 January 1932); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Nick Adams of "Fathers and Sons" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)

• Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
  • The old waiter of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)

• 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.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (28 May 1934); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.
  • Letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (11 April 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. 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? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
  • Postscript to letter to critic, poet and translator Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
  • Green Hills of Africa (1935) ch. 1

• 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 patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i.e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
  • Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)

• However you make your living is where your talent lies.
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)

• The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Originally in Esquire "Julian" was named as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in "The Rich Boy" (1926) had written: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand..." Fitzgerald responded to this in a letter (August 1936) to Hemingway saying: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."

• Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
  • On Ezra Pound, as quoted in The New Republic (11 November 1936)

• 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.
  • Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

• 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.
  • Letter (26 August 1940); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
  • Introduction to Men at War (1942)

• 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 instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
  • Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)

• All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
  • Letter (9 April 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
  • Letter (23 July 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.
  • Letter to Malcolm Cowley (17 October 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.
  • Letter to Malcolm Cowley (14 November 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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 remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
  • As quoted in "Portrait of Mr. Papa" by Malcolm Cowley in LIFE magazine (10 January 1949)

• Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
  • Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.
  • Source: quoted in Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway, which first appeared in the The New Yorker (13 May 1950). The profile was later published as a short book titled Portrait of Hemingway (1961). Variant:
    I started out very quiet and I beat Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

• Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.
  • Letter to Marlene Dietrich (27 June 1950)

• Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
  • Letter (9 July 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
  • Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
  • Letter (21 June 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (13 September 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (2 October 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
  • Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (24 September 1954); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
  • As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

• I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
  • Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.
  • As quoted in The New York Post (24 January 1957)

• 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 coast down them. ... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
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    • We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
      • New York Journal-American (11 July 1961)
    
    
    • Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it.
      • Letter to F Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in Scott Fitzgerald (1962) by Andrew Turnbull (1962) Ch. 14
    
    
    • If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
      • As quoted in That Summer in Paris (1963) by Morley Callaghan
    
    
    • I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
      • As quoted in Reporting (1964) by Lillian Ross
    
    
    • 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.
      • As quoted in A Second Flowering (1973) by Malcolm Cowley
    
    
    • 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.
      • As quoted in Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Co. (1974) by James Mellow
    
    
    • You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
      • Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway
    
    
    • It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
      • On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson
    
    
    • You're beautiful, like a May fly.
      • Statement to his future wife Mary Welsh, recalled in her obituaries (26 November 1986)
    
    

    The Sun Also Rises (1926)

    • You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. It's sort of what we have instead of God.
    
    
    • A bottle of wine was good company.
    
    
    • All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.
    
    
    • This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.
      • Count Mippipopolous, in Book 1, Ch. 7
    
    
    • You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.
      • Bill Gorton to Jake Barnes, in Book. 2, Ch. 12
    
    

    A Farewell to Arms (1929)

    
    
    • I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
      • Ch. 15
    
    
    • I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
      • Ch. 27 (1929).
    
    
    • The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
      • Ch. 34
    
    
    • "You're my religion; you're all I've got."
    
    

    Death in the Afternoon (1932)

    • About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
      • Ch. 1 (1932).
    
    
    • All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
      • Ch. 7
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 7
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 9
    
    
    • Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
      • Ch. 9
    
    
    • The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
      • Ch. 10
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 11
    
    
    • Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
      • Ch. 11
    
    
    • Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
      • Ch. 11
    
    
    • Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
      • Ch. 16
    
    
    • A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
      • Ch. 16
    
    
    • When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
      • Ch. 16
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 16
    
    

    A Letter from Cuba (1934)

    "Old Newsman Writes : A Letter from Cuba" in Esquire (December 1934)

    
    
    
    • All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
    
    
    • The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
    
    
    • Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
    
    
    • Personal columnists ... are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.
    
    
    • 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, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
    
    
    • All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
    
    

    For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

    The title of this work comes from "Meditation XVII" by John Donne

    
    
    • I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally. as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.
      • Ch. 13
    
    
    • What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.
      • Ch. 13
    
    
    • He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
      • Ch. 30
    
    
    • If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
      • Ch 43
    
    
    • There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
      • Ch 43
    
    
    • For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.
      • Ch. 13
    
    
    • If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
    
    
    • Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.
    
    
    • That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.
    
    

    The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

    • “Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
    
    “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”
    
    • He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. The old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.
    
    
    • Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
    
    

    Nobel Prize Speech (1954)

    Delivered from Hemingway's notes by US Ambassador John C. Cabot (10 December 1954) Full text online

    
    
    
    • No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
    
    
    • Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. 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.
    
    
    • 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.
    
    
    • A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
    
    

    Paris Review interview (1958)

    Interviewed by George Plimpton Paris Review Issue 18 (Spring 1958); later published in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963)

    
    
    • 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.
    
    
    • 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.
    
    
    • From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
    
    
    • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
    
    
    • Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no- quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
    
    
    • All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
    
    

    A Moveable Feast (1964)

    • "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
    
    
    • If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
      • Epigraph
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 6
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 11
    
    
    • Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
      • Ch. 12
    
    
    • 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.
      • Ch. 12
    
    
    • All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
      • Ch 17; Variant: All things truly wicked start from innocence.
        • As quoted by R Z Sheppard in review of The Garden of Eden (1986) TIME (26 May 1986)
    
    
    • 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 no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
      • Ch. 17 (On F. Scott Fitzgerald)
    
    
    • As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank the cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.
    
    
    

    Papa Hemingway (1966)

    Quotations of Hemingway from the book by A.E. Hotchner (1966 edition)

    
    
    • One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.
    
    
    • All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.
      • Similar to his remark in "A Letter from Cuba" (1934)
    
    
    • Never confuse movement with action.
      • As quoted by Marlene Dietrich, who added "In those five words he gave me a whole philosophy." Pt. 1, Ch. 1
    
    
    • Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
      • Pt. 1, Ch. 3
    
    
    • Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
      • On being informed that Faulkner had said that Hemingway "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Pt. 1, Ch. 4
    
    
    • The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
      • Pt. 1, Ch. 4
    
    
    • 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."
      • Pt. 2, Ch. 5
    
    
    • 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.
      • Pt. 2, Ch. 5
    
    
    • You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
      • Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).
    
    

    Islands in the Stream (1970)

    • The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.
    
    

    Quotes about

    • I wonder now what Ernest Hemmingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.
      • Kurt Vonnegut, "The Random House Dictionary" (book review) in The New York Times. Reprinted as "New Dictionary" in Welcome to the Monkey House.