Quotes By Ernest Hemingway

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

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.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

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

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

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.

Never mistake motion for action.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Courage is grace under pressure.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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.

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.

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

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

Never confuse movement with action.