Ernest Hemingway Quotes
Ernest Hemingway Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Ernest Hemingway quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Ernest Hemingway. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
By Ernest Hemingway
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
By Ernest Hemingway
When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
By Ernest Hemingway
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
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.
By Ernest Hemingway
There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.
By Ernest Hemingway
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
By Ernest Hemingway