Ernest Hemingway
There is no rule on how to write.Collection: Writing
I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.Collection: Thinking
As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.Collection: Wise
Easy writing makes hard reading.Collection: Reading
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.Collection: Country
I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.Collection: Nature
I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.Collection: Cheer
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.Collection: Beautiful
A cat has absolute honesty.Collection: Honesty
I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.Collection: Thinking
I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.Collection: Journey
I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.Collection: Baseball
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?Collection: Music
Never mistake movement for actionCollection: Mistake
What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.Collection: Women
Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.Collection: Country
And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.Collection: Long
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.Collection: Writing
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.Collection: Writing
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.Collection: Eye
A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.Collection: Writing
You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.Collection: Writing
Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.Collection: Writing
Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.Collection: Next
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.Collection: Writing
He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.Collection: Able
Life is the best left hooker I ever saw, although some say it was Charlie White of ChicagoCollection: White
Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.Collection: Awful
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.Collection: Night
Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?Collection: Thinking
(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.Collection: War
The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.Collection: Beautiful
I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night." "I want to go home and into bed." "We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.Collection: Beautiful
The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.Collection: Waste
The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.Collection: Speak
This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy itCollection: Storm
I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.Collection: Drinking
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.Collection: Notebook
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.Collection: Morning
Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.Collection: Writing
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.Collection: Attitude
The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.Collection: Mean
Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of,and you welcome them and resent the new thingsCollection: Radio
What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.Collection: Grace
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.Collection: Writing
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.Collection: Thinking
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.Collection: People
And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? NoCollection: Rain