Ernest Hemingway
It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.Collection: Writing
There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.Collection: Tolls
A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.Collection: Children
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.Collection: Writing
Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspectiveCollection: Writing
Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?Collection: Life Is
Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.Collection: Writing
Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.Collection: Faults
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."Collection: Funny
Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill.Collection: Night
I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.Collection: Farewell
I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.Collection: Broken
People fall in love, but have to climb out.Collection: Falling In Love
You never understand anybody that loves you.Collection: Love You
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.Collection: Peace
One cat just leads to another.Collection: Cat
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.Collection: Work
What is moral is what you feel good after.Collection: Feel Good
Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.Collection: Running
Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.Collection: Writing
It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.Collection: War
Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action.Collection: Movement
All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.Collection: Drinking
French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.Collection: Language
For what are we born if not to aid one another?Collection: Aids
Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.Collection: Writing
To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.Collection: War
You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.Collection: Horse
There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.Collection: Farewell To Arms
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.Collection: Moving
All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.Collection: Pride
The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.Collection: Moving
I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.Collection: Animal
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.Collection: Writing
Good dialogue is not real speech-it's the illusion of real speech.Collection: Real
Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.Collection: Long
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.Collection: Balls
I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.Collection: Drunk
In war, one cannot say what one feels.Collection: War
One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.Collection: War
Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.Collection: Writing
It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.Collection: House
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 another.Collection: Book
We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood.Collection: Lucky
Tell me some true things about fighting.''Tell me you love me.''I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.Collection: Girl
However you make your living is where your talent lies.Collection: Lying
He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.Collection: Beautiful
My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.Collection: Lucky
Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.Collection: Broken Heart