 |
Hollywood
|
|
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
|
|
Humility
|
|
|
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
|
|
Humor
|
|
|
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
|
|
Hunting
|
|
|
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
|
|
Inflation
|
|
|
The first panacea for a misguided nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Innocence
|
|
|
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Inventing, Inventions
|
|
|
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
|
|
Journalism
|
|
|
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Learning
|
|
|
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Legacy
|
|
|
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
|
|
Letters (writing)
|
|
|
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
|
|
Life
|
|
|
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
|
|
Listening
|
|
|
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Literary
|
|
|
It was a pleasant caf
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Love
|
|
|
Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Marriage
|
|
|
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.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Morals
|
|
|
What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Paradise, Utopia
|
|
|
A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Patriotism
|
|
|
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
|
|
People
|
|
|
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
Politics
|
|
|
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
|
|
Prayer
|
|
|
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
|
|
Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
Purpose
|
|
|
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end
-Ernest Hemingway
|
Books by and about Ernest Hemingway