Ernest Hemingway Quotes | GloryQuotes

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Writing

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Life

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

More Quotes 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.

Ernest Hemingway

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Ernest Hemingway

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Ernest Hemingway

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

Browse 86 quotes attributed to Ernest Hemingway, listed in the source data as a American Novelist, organized around themes such as Writing, Life, War. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.