Ernest Hemingway
Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.Collection: Life
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?Collection: Running
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?Collection: Dog
No Pilar," Agustin said. "You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart.Collection: Smart
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.Collection: Filled Up
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.Collection: Writing
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.Collection: Writing
We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.Collection: Way
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.Collection: Writing
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.Collection: Simple
In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.Collection: Atheist
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.Collection: World
In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.Collection: Beautiful
Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.Collection: Atheist
No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga.Collection: Two
I felt very lonely when they were all there.Collection: Lonely
Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.Collection: Heart
The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.Collection: My Best Friend
I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.Collection: Life Lesson
But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.Collection: Fall
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.Collection: Doctors
I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?Collection: Trying
Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.Collection: Appreciation
I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.Collection: Eye
Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.Collection: Games
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.Collection: America
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.Collection: Liars
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.Collection: Art
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.Collection: Believe
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.Collection: Book
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many thingsCollection: Real
Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.Collection: Growing Up
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.Collection: Prose Writing
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.Collection: Sorry
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.Collection: Writing
The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.Collection: Military
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.Collection: Writing
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.Collection: World
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.Collection: Strong
Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.Collection: Writing
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.Collection: Truth
Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.Collection: Writing
I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?Collection: Love
Write hard and clear about what hurts.Collection: Hurt
My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.Collection: World
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.Collection: Next Day
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.Collection: Beautiful
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.Collection: Writing
To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.Collection: Life Lesson