Famous Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (100 Quotations)

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Ernest Hemingway – [Life and Living]

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Ernest Hemingway – [Creativity]

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 – [Critics and Criticism]

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 – [Publishing and Publishers]

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 – [Obscenity]

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Ernest Hemingway – [Uncertainty]

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.

Ernest Hemingway – [Literature]

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

Ernest Hemingway – [Biography]

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.

Ernest Hemingway – [Appearance]

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 – [Modesty]

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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.

Ernest Hemingway – [Doctors]

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Ernest Hemingway – [Writers and Writing]

I know now that there is no one thing that is true — it is all true.

Ernest Hemingway – [Truth]

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Ernest Hemingway – [Listening]

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 – [Style]

I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.

Ernest Hemingway – [Recreation]

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Ernest Hemingway – [War]

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.

Ernest Hemingway – [Airplane and Aviation]

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Ernest Hemingway – [Fights and Fighting]

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 – [Patriotism]