Quotes by 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.”

“But did thee feel the earth move?”

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“In order to write about life, first you must live it!”

“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 al”

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writers radar and all great writers have had it.”

“I go to sleep to dream because you are my dream. Now, that I have you, my life needs no rest.”

“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.”

“Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.”

“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.”

“If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”

“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”

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

“But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“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 mans life to know them the little new that each man gets from”

“Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.”

“We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a persons duty to understand the world rather than simply fight for it”

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

“By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.”

“Good advice is often a doubtful remedy, but generally not dangerous because it has so littleeffect......”