Ernest Hemingway quotes

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“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

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“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

“The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“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

“If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“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

“You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

— 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

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“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

“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

— Ernest Hemingway

“For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.”

— Ernest Hemingway