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Ernest Hemingway

254 quotes

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his family (18 October 1918); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. It was also published in The Oak Parker (Oak Park, IL) on 16 November 1918. Only 19 years …
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922)
“Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trout Fishing in Europe", in The Toronto Star Weekly (17 November 1923)
“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Age Demanded" in Der Querschnitt (February 1925); as quoted in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Sherwood Anderson (23 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“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 be an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“To me a 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 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or 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”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Another Country" in Men Without Women (1927).
“‘It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.’”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Che ti dice la Patria?" in Men Without Women (1927)
“Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“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 the other.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Grace under pressure.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hemingway's famous phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (20 April 1926), published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. In the letter, he wrote that he was "not referring t…
“I know monks masturbate at night That pet cats screw That some girls bite And yet What can I do To set things right?”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Earnest Liberal's Lament" (1924) in The Suppressed Poems (1929)
“I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Marlene Dietrich (1 July 1930)
“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (5–6 January 1932); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nick Adams of "Fathers and Sons" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The old waiter of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)
“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (28 May 1934); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (11 April 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Everyone tries to frighten you now by saying or writing that if one does not become a communist or have a Marxian viewpoint one will have no friends and be alone. They seem to think that to be alone is something dreadful; or that to not have friends is to be hated. I would rather have one honest friend than most of the friends that I have known.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 333
“I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First, I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state, I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation... I believe in the absolute minimum of government.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 333
“A writer is like a Gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer, he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him. The minute anyone knows any bureaucracy well enough, he will hate it. Because the minute it passes a certain size it must be unjust.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 334
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to "On the Blue Water" (April 1936)
“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 by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
“However you make your living is where your talent lies.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
“The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Originally in Esquire "Julian" was named as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in …
“Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Ezra Pound, as quoted in The New Republic (11 November 1936)
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to S. Kip Farrington Jr., Atlantic Game Fishing (1937)
“There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism. 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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address, American Writers Congress, New York City (1937). Reprinted in New Masses (June 22, 1937)
“For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)
“As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)
“The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever...Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)
“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler
“I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (26 August 1940); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In response to Communist writer Mike Gold's criticism of Hemingway's depiction of the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls; as quoted in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life, New York, Scribners, 1969, p. 459.
“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to Men at War (1942)
“Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to Men at War (1942)
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)
“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (9 April 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“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.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (23 July 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Malcolm Cowley (17 October 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Malcolm Cowley (14 November 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“Easy writing makes hard reading.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128
“It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Portrait of Mr. Papa" by Malcolm Cowley in LIFE magazine (10 January 1949)