Famous Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (100 Quotations)

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway – [Writers and Writing]

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

Ernest Hemingway – [Symbols]

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

Ernest Hemingway – [Truth]

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Ernest Hemingway – [Writers and Writing]

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Ernest Hemingway – [Sense of Humor]

This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.

Ernest Hemingway – [Wine]

To be a successful father… there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

Ernest Hemingway – [Fathers]

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.

Ernest Hemingway – [Heaven]

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway – [Writers and Writing]

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 – [Bible]

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Ernest Hemingway – [Morality]

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway – [Fiction]

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

Ernest Hemingway – [Public Office]

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 – [Hunting]

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Ernest Hemingway – [Travel and Tourism]

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway – [Writers and Writing]

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Ernest Hemingway – [Literary Criticism]

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway – [Fiction]

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

Ernest Hemingway – [Hollywood]

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.

Ernest Hemingway – [Exile]