Quotes By 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.

A serious writer is not to be confounded 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.

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.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

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.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.