Ernest Hemingway
If a writer stops observing, he is finished.Collection: Observation
A bottle of wine was good company.Collection: Wine
Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.Collection: Enough
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.Collection: Thinking
Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.Collection: Hate
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.Collection: Writing
You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.Collection: Farewell To Arms
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.Collection: Brother
Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.Collection: Book
Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.Collection: Mean
There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.Collection: Home
A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.Collection: Girl
Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.Collection: Writing
Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.Collection: Appreciation
Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.Collection: Brave
Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.Collection: Lying
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.Collection: Luck
All bad writers are in love with the epic.Collection: Writing
I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would beCollection: Would Be
Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.Collection: Writing
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.Collection: Lying
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.Collection: Feet
You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.Collection: Practice
When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.Collection: Dangerous
I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.Collection: Art
Life is pain, so live it up while you can.Collection: Life
The best writing is certainly when you are in loveCollection: Writing
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.Collection: Writing
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.Collection: Spring
Hunger is good discipline.Collection: Discipline
You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.Collection: Development
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.Collection: Trying
I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.Collection: Morning
A person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine.Collection: Wine
That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a wonderful discovery.Collection: Discovery
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.Collection: Writing
Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.Collection: Odd Things
I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.Collection: Fear
The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.Collection: Sea
I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.Collection: Beautiful
I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.Collection: Hurt
Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.Collection: Military
It is very bad for (an artist) to talk about how he (creates). It is not the (artist's) province to explain or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. It's none of their business that you had to learn. Let them think you were born that way.Collection: Running
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.Collection: Lying
The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.Collection: Way
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.Collection: Syphilis
You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.Collection: Sex
The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.Collection: Stupid
In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.Collection: Book