Ernest Hemingway quotes - page 4

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light. (Ernest Hemingway)
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the w. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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. (Ernest Hemingway)
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Write drunk, edit sober. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
As you get older it is harder to have heroes. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you the good and the bad, the ecstacy, 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. (Ernest Hemingway)
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. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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.'' View quote
Ernest Hemingway
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
There are only three sports bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering all the rest are merely games. View quote
Ernest Hemingway