Quotes By Ernest Hemingway

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

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.

Never confuse movement with action.

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.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

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

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.

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

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

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.

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

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.

Man is not made for defeat.

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